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Gentlemen from Hooker - and many other places - are quite literally pouring these and many other poisons into your coffee and your kids' juice. They just do it in a more indirect, anonymous, and apparently socially acceptable way.
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Margaret Wente's chutzpah
By Ulli Diemer
The classic definition of chutzpah cites the man who kills both his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. An updated example of chutzpah is provided by ideologues like Margaret Wente (Bureaucracy Kills, September 10) who, day after day, year after year, devote their energies to badmouthing public institutions and demanding they be stripped of resources and denied the ability to act, and who then have the gall to point to the deliberately engineered impotence of these agencies as proof that public institutions don't work.
The New Orleans post-hurricane catastrophe, like the poisoning of Walkerton's water, were events whose likelihood was repeatedly predicted by experts working for public agencies. In each instance, these experts' well-substantiated warnings were ignored by administrations pursuing an ideologically driven agenda of starving and crippling the public sector.
The Bush administration, like Mike Harris's in Ontario before it, followed a deliberate policy of slashing funding to agencies responsible for public safety, silencing or driving out the dedicated professionals who are the heart and soul of those agencies, and appointing incompetent political hacks to run them.
And now the very people, like Margaret Wente, who advocated and cheered for those policies, have the nerve to claim that the resulting debacles are proof that we need more of the same. Chutzpah indeed!
Ulli Diemer
11 September 2005
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