Letters

Bush in a hidey hole

It has been an uplifting week of joy and jubilation seeing the war criminal George Bush pinned down at his hidey hole in Crawford, Texas, by a righteously angry and sorely grieving mother of a deceased Iraq war soldier.

Better than any other demonstration or congressional hearing to date, the determined and victorious Cindy Sheehan, mother of Casey Sheehan, has put President Bush on trial morally and politically for his illegal war, in front of not only the entire nation, but the entire world, and has branded him guilty as charged!

Val Eisman

Oakland CA

Cindy Sheehan, one honest woman

Diogenes, the Greek philosopher and social commentator, reportedly went about shining a lantern in the faces of strangers looking for “one honest man.” Cindy Sheehan is one honest woman, and Bush doesn’t know what to do with her. Used to scripted speeches given to pre-screened cheering audiences, he doesn’t know how to handle an honest woman who speaks plain truth, and instead lets his red-neck friends mow down the crosses and American flags put up around her.

Naturally, the right-wing press labels her “a tool of leftist agitators,” conveniently forgetting that she went to Crawford entirely on her own. I, who am a Republican but despise Bush, am going to do something I’ve never done before: demonstrate in public, in support of Cindy Sheehan. In fact, I’ve made up 12 signs for one of the many candlelight rallies going on around the country in support of Ms. Sheehan.

Cindy Sheehan is the Betsy Ross of our time. I sent her a dozen roses through Code Pink (codepink4peace.org). I urge everyone else to do the same.

Wright Salisbury

Via e-mail

Maria Montelibre presente!

It is with great sadness that I read of the death of Maria Montelibre (PWW 7/30-8/5). I became aware of her by trading the Blue Collar Review for the Montelibre Monthly for the last five years. Her loss is a great one for all of us who struggle for a better world and the information that she published on Cuba will indeed be missed.

La luta continua.

Al Markowitz

Partisan Press (partisanpress.org)

Inhumane and degrading

John McCain and some other senators are working on legislation that would ban the U.S. military from hiding detainees from the Red Cross and bar American soldiers from participating in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. I wish them luck.

By the way, George Bush is against this legislation. So, this is “compassionate conservatism”?

Chuck Mann

Greensboro NC

Mubarak’s crimes

On July 23 Egypt and the whole world were shocked and terrified by the suicidal terrorist attack in Sharm El-Sheikh, a resort in Sinai-Egypt. Soon after, the Egyptian government denounced the attack and blamed some radical groups for waging unholy war against innocent civilians.

Egyptian President Mubarak found it a golden opportunity to resurface back out of the history bin as a strong statesman who can lead his people through such a hardship. Sounds like a story with a happy ending but it definitely is not.

For decades, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other civil and human rights groups have denounced the systematic practice of incommunicado detention, torture and rape — to name just a few practices — of his authoritarian regime.

Mubarak has been using all of his tricks to hold absolute power for 24 years and is willing to compromise any and everything to sustain it. Egyptians are on the verge of civil disobedience and unified behind one request: Get the dictator out of office and no to the proposed succession of the dictator’s groomed younger son.

There is no reason under the sun to justify a terrorist attack. However, the Egyptian people have every reason under the sun to expose the dictator and request his trial for crimes against humanity in front of an international court. If we decry once the terrorist attacks against hundreds, how many times do we decry sustained terrorist attacks for 24 years against a whole great nation?

Mohamad Anwar

St. Paul MN

Labor article jogged memory

I just finished reading the July 23-29 feature on the impact of anticommunism on the labor movement (“The debates in labor: Lessons from the past”).

I have a few memories about late 1952, getting fired for … yes, trying to organize a union at my place of work. It was not just any union: I wanted our shop to hook up with the United Electrical Workers (UE). The boss knew that I was the inside organizer, and I got fired.

Then on Feb. 12, 1953 (the birthday of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator), I was drafted to be part of the “police action” in Korea.

All the above came rushing back in the course of reading your centerfold piece. Today I have a paper route: four locals of the Electrical Workers Union where I am greeted with a smile and a “Thank you, brother,” when I drop off 10 or 12 papers.

Jesse Kern

St. Petersburg FL

Roberts not ‘mainstream’

We are being told that the nomination of Judge John Roberts is “non-controversial,” that there will be no filibuster, and that the Bush administration has made a brilliant move. On whose planet and in what century?

Roberts fits the class profile of the corporate attorneys who controlled the Supreme Court between the Civil War and the New Deal and knocked down most progressive legislation providing for minimum wages, abolishing child labor and regulating business. With justices like that, we wouldn’t have any Social Security or unemployment insurance or wages and hours legislation or any federal protection against union-busting.

It is true Roberts hasn’t pledged to burn doctors who do pregnancy terminations at the stake and he hasn’t advocated turning public school rooms into church pews. Does that make him “mainstream”?

I think it would be a great idea for some candidate planning to run for president to pledge to put a progressive labor lawyer on the Supreme Court before we all drown in the Republicans “mainstream.”

Norman Markowitz

Via e-mail