Blogs From the Liberal Standpoint: 2004-2005
Product Description
Blogs From The Liberal Standpoint: 2004-2005 is the first blog book to seriously address the major political and social issues of our time in a thorough, fascinating, and entertaining way. Topics covered include the war in Iraq, abuses of presidential, administrative, military and media power. There are several blog books currently on the market, but this is the first one to directly and comprehensively cover the issues that matter the most, including early co… More >>
Blogs From the Liberal Standpoint: 2004-2005
Categories: Books | 
Tags: 20042005, Blogs, from, Liberal, Standpoint | 
5 Comments »
There are two ways to approach this book:
One is to accept as God decreed fact that ‘In 2004, if not before, it became utterly clear that the voters — or, more accurately, the Supreme Court — had selected an incompetent for President ….’ (This is to ignore that in 2000 the Supreme Court was heavily involved, in 2004 they didn’t do much, and that Al Gore couldn’t even carry his home state of Tennessee, largely because of the far left’s view of gun control.)
The second is to see and understand what the far left wing of the country is thinking, perhaps to join them, perhaps to counter them.
On the whole I find that I enjoyed reading it, I agree with some that he says, I disagree with some, but that mostly I’d like to get together with him at the local pub and go over a lot of his points of view with a few pints of ale. Nearly every one of his blogs brings up a question or two that I’d like to ask. Just to give you an example, a few questions I’d like to ask are:
Liberals are very angry about the war in Iraq. The biggest point seems to be that a couple of thousand young men have died in the couple of years that we’ve been there. That’s about the number of young people (both genders) that die in 3-4 weeks in automobile accidents. Why aren’t liberals up in arms about auto safety? How about safer cars, safer highways, lower speed limits?
With regard to the insufficiently armored Humvee and the failure to improve it, he lambasts Don Rumsfeld for saying that ‘You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want.’ Then he goes on to say that in every war military equipment has improved. True, but remember that the Hellcat didn’t enter combat with the Navy until August 31, 1943. For almost two years the Navy had to fight World War II with the Wildcat, a plane decidedly inferior to the Japanese Zero.
So it is with the case of Iraq, go do a web search for ’stryker vehicle.’ It’s a new vehicle that would be very useful in Iraq if we could build enough of them fast enough and if we were happy with the design. Yes, there are some in Iraq already with the Third Brigade of the Second Infantry Division. Is the Stryker perfect, no, but using it in Iraq is finding problems that can be fixed. Until you get the problems fixed you don’t want to build a whole bunch, you may wind up worse off than you are now, and it takes time to do this. Rather than pointing out what is happening Dr. Velvel would rather comment on ‘the stupidity of Rumsfeld’s remarks.’ Of course, in fairness to Velvel, he was commenting only on the Humvee.
Another question, there are some real, serious problems facing the world: oil production is at a peak and from here will go down while oil consumption it going up; the availability of clean unpolluted water is a major problem facing the US and the world; AIDS, bird flu, and other potential pandemics for which we have no known cure, seem to be upon us; why this much on Iraq, ignoring the other problems? What about the litmus test issues of gun control and abortion? What about the changing demographics of the country that say the left wing view is declining in popularity, or is it?
Oh by the way, he doesn’t like Bush.
Rating: 5 / 5
Despite not being of the liberal persuasion myself, I admire the way Professor Velvel takes on the educational establishment and government policies. And sometimes I agree with him. Regardless of agreement, I enjoy these blogs. The writing is crisp, clear, always interesting. And the great thing is that the blogs are relatively short articles, good for a mental break.
Dr. Velvel’s take on how elite educational institutions are deliberately (he says) excluding middle and lower class student is nothing short of brilliant analysis. And his take on the case of academic plagiarism in one noted situation is equally amazing. Velvel analyses each sentence uttered in defense of this lapse by the perpetrator with a lawyer’s ear for fine nuances of truth and untruth.
The blogs are normally available to readers online, but this is a very handy format for reading at your leisure away from the computer screen. Every time I flip open a page at random, I find something that makes me think. Even when I disagree with the blogs, I find them well-argued, well-written and above all, thought-provoking. I’d recommend this to anyone who IS a liberal in order to learn how to reason and argue and to conservatives to learn how to sharpen their opposing points. Dr. Velvel is a formidable writer and thinker.
Rating: 5 / 5
Dean Velvel and I are from the same generation. We share much of the same disgust with what has happened to America in our lifetimes. When we were young, America was the greatest country in the world, probably by any reasonable accounting, the greatest country in the history of the world. Why? Because we gave hope to the entire world with our form of government which allowed everyone the opportunity and freedom, as the founding fathers had it, to pursue happiness. Ours was not a perfect meritocracy, but it was one of the best on earth. Our government was accountable to the people and we had a Constitution that protected individual liberties.
Furthermore we had won the biggest, most horrific and dangerous war in the history of the world, and we had the magnanimity (and wisdom) to help the vanquished rebuild. Our people were prosperous, confident, admired and respected everywhere. We had assumed the moral leadership of the world.
And then something happened, and this is what frustrates and angers Velvel, and this is what drives him to express his views so vehemently with such force of expression and passion. He refers to Vietnam and the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and he compares what happened then to what is happening now.
We “won” the Cold War–but at what cost? Sometime along about the middle sixties, sometime after the Bay of Pigs, somewhere east of Suez and sometime after President Kennedy was assassinated, America began to lose its moral compass. The Cold War was scary. The stakes were high. The world had become enormously complicated and we had to save it from the scourge of communism. And little by little we saw that the end justified the means, any means, whether it was propping up murderous dictators in banana republics or napalming “gooks” in Vietnam or supplying and supporting horrendous dictators like Saddam Hussein in the Middle East–it didn’t matter as long as it could be justified in the name of anti-communism.
Unfortunately as the task became more and more difficult, as the complexities became stupefying, our leaders became more and more mediocre, and more and more corrupt. Hand-selected by the power brokers, again and again we installed men of questionable morality and suspect intelligence into the presidency until we came to the nadir, the presidency of George W. Bush, the most mendacious and incompetent president we have ever had.
But the most disturbing thing about the Bush presidency is not his incompetence or his stupidity. (Velvel repeatedly calls Bush “stupid,” which I think is misleading; Bush is not the brightest of men and he is not well read, but he is not stupid.) What is most disturbing about the Bush presidency is what Velvel calls its “overarching principle,” which makes the president “all powerful whenever he asserts a claim that what he authorizes or does is for the purpose of fighting a war.” (pp. 487-488)
Bush believes this power comes from the commander-in-chief clause of the Constitution. But the Founders never dreamed that a president could simply declare a state of war and thereby increase the executive’s power to near dictatorial status. Yet that is what Bush has done. If he can keep the country in a perpetual state of war–and it would seem that he can (terrorism, like crime, is never likely to end)–then the delicate balance of power that the Founders envisioned will be severely distorted. One is reminded prophetically of Orwell’s 1984 in which the three great powers were perpetually at war as a means of controlling their citizens. This seems to be Bush’s strategy.
All of this and more is what Velvel rails against in nearly five hundred pages of rapid-fire prose, prose tinged with exasperation and alarm. He is particularly incensed at Bush and the war in Iraq, at torture condoned if not directed from the top, and at what he sees as the incompetence of the media.
I agree that Bush and his cronies in the White House made a horrendous blunder in invading Iraq. I agree that they lied about why they did it. And I agree that the draconian secrecy of the Bush administration is like something in a dictatorship. But are Bush, Rumsfeld, etc., guilty of war crimes, as Velvel insists?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. At any rate, they will never be charged with anything like that regardless of how shrill Velvel’s voice becomes. Bush undoubtedly believes that protecting Americans overshadows any international notion of criminal behavior in time of war. Besides only the losers are charged with war crimes. The US may have to come home from Iraq weakened and embarrassed, but no one will be in a position to put anybody in our government on trial for war crimes.
I also think Velvel misses the mark when he tells us that the press is incompetent because our brightest and best are not going into journalism. The real problem with journalism today is that it is in the hands of huge corporations. The corporate heads that dispense and control media care little about responsible journalism or the concept of the Fourth Estate. They are conservative people interested in the bottom line, controlling the populace, and in maintaining people in office who will do their bidding–people like Bush. The individual reporters may be less than our best perhaps because it takes a rare kind of constitution to go against both the government and your bosses.
Overall Velvel’s book is welcome because of the forthright way he expresses himself, and the refreshing prose that is neither mealy-mouthed or muted with euphemism. But he could use an editor. A lot could be pruned. The book could be made more user friendly with an index and some kind of systematic organization that introduces the various topics to the reader.
Rating: 4 / 5
The reader should be aware when buying this extraordinary book that it is not one that can be skimmed for the juicy parts. Lawrence R. Velvel is bright, well credentialed, and a very brave man. Admittedly not from the Computer Generation (he handwrites his ‘blogs’, types them on a conventional typewriter, has them proofread and then gives them to a computer literate person to place on line, this collection of Blogs (the ‘new’ means – many would agree the only means – of Free Press available in this country today) is in fact essays of a liberal thinker who cares deeply about the decline of morality in academia and in political leadership.
Velvel rightly attacks the absurdity and global tragedy of the preemptive war on Iraq by Bush and his Hessians and compares it to its twin war in Vietnam not so many years before. His words are strong and his accusations penetrating. But AT LAST someone is printing these blatantly out of control facts, allowing the public at large to read and hopefully to think about the actuality of what is happening. He admonishes the press, the media of all types, and first and foremost the Commander in Chief who seems to believe he is above all law and democratic safety measures written into the Constitution.
Granted this book will not even be read by the political Right: those who agree with how the country is being managed by the Oil Kings, replacing a critically ill Democracy with an Oligarchy. So much the pity. Velvel carefully traces the downfall of the presidency and repeatedly gives evidence of the seriously impaired mentality of Bush, a president surrounded by clones, who acts on impulse, reads only one-page summaries of Intelligence Briefings (that bring the only thing he DOES read), and making decisions on half-truths.
The issues Velvel adroitly and acerbically covers fill this 500-page book to overflowing – and thank goodness there is at least one voice to ride the Paul Revere horse to warn us. Torture, eroding of human rights, and corruption of every type whether it be in the Middle East debacle or in the management of national natural disasters, global warming, immigration atrocities – all of these plead to be addressed. How fortunate we are that Lawrence Velvel has the courage and intelligence to communicate these facts both in this written format and in his online Blogline! Grady Harp, July 06
Rating: 5 / 5
A friend of mine handed this book off to me and I have to admit I was very skeptical at first. The book proved to be insightful and witty and my skepticism was quickly dismissed. The book covers lots of topics including: torture, executive malaise, plagiarism and various problems in government, the media and academia. It’s written in a matter of fact style which is disarmingly frank- but after all this is a collection of blogs- not to be confused with the crappy blogs that permeate the internet – Velvel’s blogs are real essays that are well written.
I’m 21 years old and I am about to graduate from college. This book hammered me over the head with the notion that I know virtually nothing. Velvel’s book is a timeline of his own learning, reading and thought. This book tells me that being a truly educated person is a process- a process in which daily reading, a commitment to life long learning (Velvel visits Oxford for a summer class on pg. 238 and learns about Lord Nelson) and determined study are the staples. Which leads me to my main point. Velvel writes extensively on the rot that is taking place in American culture but probably doesn’t realize his own writings are the prescription to solve the problem. Honesty, competence, care for others and life long learning are the keys to building a more productive society and correcting a culture that is collapsing.
Velvel should write more on life long learning and reading as it clearly is something he values deeply. The book is full of little tidbits like the newspapers he reads or the books he has read or famous authors he has interviewed. These are great insights into a life committed to learning. For me personally this book has shown me that reading the headlines on cnn.com and watching the nightly news are not enough to become a productive member of society. One must commit to the pursuit of truth and knowledge.
Rating: 5 / 5