Comments on: Conason’s Lost Truth About Reconciliation

By: HardheadedLiberal

HardheadedLiberal — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:36:03 +0000

Difficulty is no excuse for failure.

What department/agency had the slogan, “The difficult we do today. The impossible may take a little longer”?

Marines? NASA?

As the slogan indicated, you are absolutely right. And equally compelling, difficulty is no excuse for not doing the right thing.

By: DrDave

DrDave — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:45:36 +0000

Maybe those same international authorities could run our elections, too. Hey, can we get a real TV station like the BBC while we are at it to show “the series”?

By: AitchD

AitchD — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:38:59 +0000

Yes, readerOfTeaLeaves sounds like Ulysses in Troilus And Cressida when he chides Achilles for not respecting degree, priority, and place - Essex wanted Elizabeth’s throne.

Shakespeare’s name appears as one of the players at the Globe.

By: freepatriot

freepatriot — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:01:39 +0000

It used to be that people learned about things after they happened, from reporters, couriers, or historians, but not while things were happening, except when they went to the theater.

most people don’t understand that shakespear was as much about political commentary as it was about entertainment

and technically, willie never wrote anything

it was the actor’s job to know his lines …

By: readerOfTeaLeaves

readerOfTeaLeaves — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 07:24:39 +0000

Lovely. I’d not thought of the theater in that way, viewing early Shakespeare as adaptations of medieval Mystery Plays, but those were still moral tales. (I thought ‘current events’ were told via Punch N Judy.) And yes, those Troubadours were all about codes of behavior.

I fear that we now have ‘Hector with a cell phone, and Achilles with an antiaircraft missile’. Tribal hatreds, with high tech weaponry. And note that neither Hector nor Achilles were literate; they, like some today, are of an oral culture.
Alas…

RHGreen, look what happened to the French aristocrats.
Never wise to think oneself immune from the laws of nature, demographics, and social change, eh?
Surely Leahy knows that much?

By: AitchD

AitchD — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 07:10:13 +0000

‘Codifying’ isn’t my word of preference (though I mean it), I would really mean ‘transforming’. The troubadours used Christian and Church imagery transformed into ‘courtly’ and passionate behaviors (and they transformed old Roman texts). (In another related sense, Soul music transforms Gospel music’s ‘Jesus’ into ‘Baby’.) Yet there was a code of behavior they described, and later, Shakespeare’s Cassio and Desdemona know the code, but Othello and Iago don’t know it. Oh, and btw, you’re also right: when Romeo and Juliet meet, they exchange the parts of a Petrarchan-style (rhymed) sonnet in English!

It used to be that people learned about things after they happened, from reporters, couriers, or historians, but not while things were happening, except when they went to the theater.

By: R.H. Green

R.H. Green — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 06:55:39 +0000

By the clock on the wall I’d guess it to be about EPU time.

When Leahy came out with his call for a truth commission, he spoke of the pointlessness of prosecutions as “seeking vengeance”. Leahy was a prosecutor, and one cannot help but wonder if he now considers his efforts in that regard as merely a seeking of vengeance. My guess is that he would want to insist that without penalties, the law would not function to give order to society. I should ask him about that.
Somehow I get the idea that he and Conason have friends that would be caught up in the prosecutions, and wish to find a way to avoid the implications. Not unlike French aristocrats at the time of the bloody revolution, our lordly class think punishments are for the masses.

By: readerOfTeaLeaves

readerOfTeaLeaves — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:55:27 +0000

Wow! Good catches!
Humble thanks for correcting my inaccuracies.
Blank verse: meter, but no rhyme. Shakespeare wrote it, spoke it, left it for us all.
Troubadours and the Cult of the Virgin… I’m willing to take your word for ‘codified’, but no confirming recollections come to mind. I always think of them as carrying on the spoken traditions, as with ‘bardic memory’ — telling episodes night after night, “Arabian Nights” style (’No sire, I shall not leave your lovely fire and good wine until I’ve finished the entire story cycle, which I will guarantee must last at least all winter, as I’m damned if I want to be out on foot in the snow…”)

Useful mainly in considering Mary’s excellent point @76: how in hell would you even make sure you had the correct scope, funding, staff, and strategy for a good, in-depth investigation that people could follow easily…? Big challenge.

Ayoi…!

By: bmaz

bmaz — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:38:25 +0000

Oh, it is all valid, it is just not particularly new or news to most here. The article does lay out the pitiful stand being made so far by the Obama Administration. Hopefully that change will kick in soon; but, on this subject, not so much so far.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:18:08 +0000

For what it’s worth ACLU exec. dir. Anthony Romero stated ” This is not change, President Obama’s Justice Department has disappointingly reneged” on his promise to end “abuse of state secrets” blah blah.