Feedback Letters Missed their Points

The Feb. 13 issue of The Spectrum featured feedback letters that both missed the point of their respective issues.

In his letter on file sharing, Eric Tower missed much of the deeper meaning that contained within George Zornick's column. He advises people to simply not buy CDs if they deem them to be too expensive. This would be an effective approach if enough people thought the way he does.

In reality however only a conscious few will vote with their wallet while the majority of people will still pay the high prices. There are also avid music lovers such as I, who will buy the CDs no matter what as the music they are longing for is simply too good to not own.

A much more efficient approach would be if the federal government stopped listening to their corporate donors and started imposing limits on how much money customers could be charged for a CD or conversely, how much of the profits made from album sales artists should be receiving.

If the artists received more than 5 percent of the profit made off of each CD, I personally would not mind paying high prices as I only buy CDs by artists I would otherwise be willing to compensate for their efforts as well.

The second letter on the subject of the Bush administration's deception of the American people, which was, not surprisingly, nothing more than a rehash of over-reported half-truths, missed a few critical facts.

The first is certainly that both Justin Martin's letter from the Feb 11 issue and Zornick's column were printed in the opinion section of The Spectrum and are therefore irrelevant whether or not they were "liberally slanted."

The Spectrum has a history of printing sub-standard material on the opinion page, such as former Spectrum editor Corey Shoock's piece about his hair or the allegedly mean-spirited Student Association executive board. So it should not come as a surprise to conservatives who may read an editorial on that page with which they might disagree once in a while.

Further down, Sharp demonstrates his failure to research all the facts surrounding the issue involving weapons of mass destruction.

Bush's efforts to "review pre-war intelligence" are nothing but a cover-up for his administration's preference for faith-based intelligence in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. The commission is a sham. Though it is by no means non-partisan, is not independent and does not need 11 months to review evidence when all the facts are already known.

Bush himself chose all the members of the panel and Democratic members of Congress were, without any rational reason, not given a role in the process. All members of the panel have strong ties to the group of neoconservatives surrounding Bush and many have a few skeletons in their closets.

A good example of this is judge Silberman who was involved in ensuring President Jimmy Carter's exit from the White House in 1980 by working with Iranian officials to stave off the resolution of the hostage situation until after the elections.

Sharp's claim that Bush was misled also has no basis in reality. In the months preceding the war, the administration received repeated reports from both the CIA and the State Department saying that there was no hard evidence proving that Saddam Hussein had any kinds of weapons of mass destruction or even the ability to produce them.

Even Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at one point chaired a commission that came to such a conclusion. Instead of heeding these warnings, Bush encouraged Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to set up the Office of Special Plans, the sole purpose of which was to find intelligence to support the administration's efforts to con the public into accepting their beliefs that Saddam Hussein posed an "imminent threat."

It should by now be clear to everyone who obtains information from any objectively low-bias sources that the president purposely lied to the American people in order to win public support for the war he had been longing to fight for so long. Whether or not Vice President Dick Cheney's ties to Halliburton were a part of the real reasons for the invasion is subject to further debate. But it is clear that imaginary weapons are no reason for war.

As for John Kerry's endorsement of the war, I am sure Sharp has noticed that ever since the early months of Bush's term, Democrats have been the "we disagree, sort of" party, mostly centrist politicians with no spine and no willingness to distinguish themselves from the centrist or even right-wing Republicans.

The only reason John Kerry would now oppose the war is that he is gung-ho on winning the elections in November and therefore has to adopt a more centrist position in order to appeal to more voters.

Bush did the exact same thing in 2000 when he claimed to be a "compassionate conservative."