MAJOR BUSH LEAGUE
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s Searching
for Jacques Shirk:
When you spoke of Jessie Jackson’s (a.k.a. Jester Jackass)
children’s rhymes you overlooked his classic “Stay out da
Bushes!”
I was sorry to see such a choice piece of idiocy overlooked!
— Robert Einarsson
CLASS DISMISSED
Re: The Washington Prowler’s State
of the Union Strikers:
RUDE, RUDE, RUDE, The Dems have NO CLASS, dissing the President
in that manner displays their lack of maturity. And approved by
leader Pelosi? Child’s play.
— Dee Ohanian
Bloomfield, MI
Isn’t “Liberal House Democrat” redundant? Like “The Department
of
Redundancy Department”?
I want to know who they were, who they represent, that almost 5%
of the House members and nearly 10% of the Democrats in the house
were so rude, so crude that they would walk away from a President
addressing the nation during a time of war, or near war and when we
really do need to attempt to do something for the economy.
I find it just unbelievable. GWB is a kind and decent man who
would never consider something like that. He has time and again
been civil in the face of in-civility, diplomatic in the face of
rude disagreement, and I want people to know just what the far left
looks like. I am stunned that 20 congressman would walk out.
— Roger Ross
Tomahawk WI
I’d like to know the names of the 20 House members who walked out
on the President’s speech. Thanks.
— Jennifer Lashley
THE RISKS OF DOING BUSINESS
Re: The Washington Prowler’s A
Head Start:
“A Connecticut entrepreneur is selling white leather yarmulkes
with a red, white and blue logo that, with clever positioning,
reads ‘Lieberman 4 President 2004.”
That’s fine, but does he give a money back guarantee or a
correctly worded replacement for when Gore decides to run and
publicly holds Lieberman to his noncompete vow?
— unsigned
ENEMY CORN
Re: Enemy Central’s When
All Is Sarandon (Again):
The American Prowler is indeed one of my very favorite
pages. You always have a perspective that is a delightful surprise.
I saw something on TV that might be of interest to the Enemy of the
Week that has another of Hollywood’s so-called professional
pretenders / experts on foreign affairs actually practicing what he
preaches.
The movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? has a scene with
George Clooneybird sitting around eating an ear of corn while
talking to his so-called friends. His one friend breaks off a
nice-sized dead tree limb and smacks his partner across the head
while Mr. Clooneybird looks on. With very little reaction to his
friend getting his melon belted out of the park by Babe Ruth, The
Clooneybird simply shrugs it off and goes back to eating his corn
while Mr. Ruth simply walks over and whacks him into the bleachers
with his friend. There is an interesting correlation with this
scene an his brilliant standard of foreign policy that Enemy
Central could do wonders with — although I seriously doubt that
anyone could make a bigger fool out of Mr. Clooney than Mr. Clooney
himself every time he opens his mouth.
Where in the world do these people come from and what has
happened to their loyalty to their fellow man and Country? It’s
down right shameful.
— Dale Janssen
Libby, MT
JUST SAY SO
Re: Lawrence Henry’s You’re
Wrong, Mr. Raspberry:
William Raspberry’s arguments reveal who the true “racists ”
are. I wish that George Bush would as clearly articulate the
tactics of excluding any opposition as being anti-black so we might
have an issue-oriented dialogue for a change. But, isn’t that the
way the left argues every position it takes? If you oppose abortion
on demand, are you not anti-women’s rights and anti-fem? And a man
isn’t allowed to enter the debate at all because he is
non-child-bearing and therefore has no standing to have any say at
all. Bravo to The Prowler for the principled
opposition.
— Richard Johnson
Sterling, VA
TOUGH ROOM
Re: George Neumayr’s Thacker
Wacked:
Mr. Neumayr informs us that Jerry Thacker comment “gay plague”
was an exhumed comment. Exhumed from where? The only attribution
ever offered that Mr. Thacker said this is derived from liberal
journals such as the N.Y. Times. Does Mr. Neumayr offer
proof that Mr. Thacker has ever said this?
No, he doesn’t; therefore, he serves well as another uninformed
lickspittle helping the liberal media spread their filth.
Mr. Thacker did indeed say “death style,” but certainly not in
the context implied by Mr. Neumayr. This guy is a conservative
voice? Not by half.
— Stephen J. Guthrie
TALKBACK LIVE
Re: J. Donnelly’s “Papal Portrait” letter in Reader Mail’s Religious
Differences:
It is intellectually dishonest, in my opinion, to provide a list
of out-of-context quotes as proof of your proposition, no matter
how prestigious the names on that list. You infer that anyone who
concludes that Pope Pius XII could have done more to help the Jews
during the Holocaust is an anti-Catholic leftist. Labeling those
whose opinions differ from your own is, I believe, taking the easy
way out. I prefer to limit my own inquiry to a careful review of
historical works. There are those who conclude, as you do, that the
Church and the Pope did all they could have reasonably have been
expected to do to save Jews. I disagree with their conclusions, as
do many historians, theologians, philosophers, etc. The works of
these scholars are readily available in any Public Library or
popular bookstore. I would suggest you take the time to read a few
(even those that may disagree with your own conclusions).
Yes, there were many Christians, among them many Catholics,
including members of the clergy, who did act or speak out, even at
great risk to themselves. Some of them paid for this courage with
their lives. We are still left with the following question: Did the
Church, as an institution, do all that it could? I, and many
others, conclude, sorrowfully, that it did not.
Some of us, believe it or not, are not members of the Anti-Roman
Catholic Left! I respect your right to disagree with me. I take
issue, however, with the fact that you, like Mr. Bowman in his
review of Amen (Der Stellvertreter), reduce those who
differ with you to a stereotype.
Respectfully,
— Jay Shuman
Elizabeth, NJ
I’m glad J. Donnelly had more to respond with to Jay Shuman’s claim
that “[n]o serious historical scholar can argue with the fact that
the Catholic Church has a well-documented history of anti-Semitism,
going back to its very beginnings” than I might have had.
The best I was able to come up with — which is why I didn’t
write immediately — is to point out that the first “pope” was St.
Peter. And he was no less Jewish than Jesus himself.
— Kevin McGehee
Coweta County, GA
CHOICE REMARKS
Re: Geoff Brandt’s “Uneasy Independence” letter in Reader Mail’s
Religious
Differences:
I’d like to thank Geoff Brandt/Deist for his splendid rehashing
of tired old rhetoric:
“But I’m an Independent who feels just a tad more like a
“Small-L” Libertarian, one who takes great exception to Ashcroft’s
visit to Oregon about its anti-suicide law, the Anti-Choice
rhetoric and the GOP’s Morality Police.
“No, I certainly am not pro-abortion, but I resent anyone —
especially those obnoxious and venomous loudmouths who would try to
tell my daughters what they can or cannot do with their
bodies.”
I can’t seem to get through the day if I don’t get my dose of
the lowest common denominator of silly one-liners being presented
as enlightened thinking.
Let’s tackle the “Anti-Choice rhetoric” he hates so much and
proclaims is the whole-owned subsidiary of the GOP.
Does he mean the GOP that wants choice in public education to
create an environment of competition and accomplishment to benefit
the students? Does he mean the GOP that wants employees to have a
choice in the 12.4% of their hard earned money taken by force from
them and their employers for Social Security? Does he mean the GOP
that want to the choice not to have their children indoctrinated
with pseudo-science and forced acceptance of homosexuality? Or
maybe it’s the evil GOP that are trying so take away our choice to
drive an SUV because they erroneously think their elimination alone
will totally wipe out our use of foreign oil?
And Mr. Brandt earns my “Look at me ma, I’m smart” award for his
predictable and tired argument about “what women can or cannot do
with their bodies.” I’m now happy to know Mr. Brandt is against
laws banning prostitution, heroin and other drug usage, public
nudity, bestiality, etc.
Gotta love those “small-L” Libertarians who should change the
name of their party to “Pot and Hookers for All”!
— Greg Barnard
Franklin, TN
BLACKBOARD JUNGLES
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s Moody
Blues:
In reference to the above column, I found it hard to decide
whether it’s tongue-in-cheek or not, when you say, “I see a need
for these medications,” as a way, I suppose, for anesthetizing not
only our children but the rest of us from the chaos and insanities
of modern day America. What makes me think you mean it is that at
one point you say about the doctors that prescribe “ritalin for
attention deficit disorder” and other “anti-depressants with
growing frequency” to our nation’s school children that they are
“not only fine doctors. They are humanitarians.”
From someone whose columns I ordinarily highly admire, these
remarks jarred me. By explanation, let me say that I grew up and
went to school from first grade through college during public
education’s golden age which in the fifties got slowly, then quite
rapidly in the sixties and seventies, snuffed out of existence. As
a returning veteran who had spent two and a half years in the
service of which 18 months was in the very thick of the fighting
and had then, in fond memory of my own school days, decided to
devote myself to that cause, and became a public school teacher in
1952, just about the time the book Blackboard Jungle
became a best seller. Whatever qualifications I may have had for
the job, timing my entrance into it wasn’t one of them. Not too
soon after, as another symptom of the maladies previously unknown
but now afflicting the entire enterprise of education, there
suddenly too arose another best seller to meteoric fame called
Why Johnny Can’t Read. The author’s Rx derived from the
misapprehension that the school system had suddenly been overcome
by amnesia and was no longer using phonics but had in fact taken a
fancy to a “new method” for teaching reading called the look-say
approach. It was this change that the author, Rudolph Flesch,
fingered as the culprit-answer to the question his book title
posed. As someone who as a student and then as a father-teacher
experienced in spades the transition from educational heaven to
educational hell, [I knew that] the true source of the change lay
in the content of the book Blackboard Jungle….
Rudolph Flesch’s best seller was not only misguided, it never
even tried to explain why illiteracy had never even been considered
a serious problem in the first 50 years of the 20th century….
In all the years in which I sat at the foot of competent and
qualified teachers who knew their subjects, I never ran into any
such beast as Attention Deficit Disorder. What is described now in
awesome medical terminology is nothing less than a scam for
preventing the current system being held accountable for
victimizing what ordinary healthy children do who stop paying
attention when they sense that what they are getting is a forced
feeding in non-learning. Can you blame them for becoming nettlesome
when, instead of getting lessons in reading, arithmetic, history,
geography and citizenship, they get lessons in problem solving,
conflict resolution, self-esteem development, and how to research
subjects about which they have not a clue to begin with.
If you were talking tongue-in-cheek, I wish you would say so in
clear unequivocal language. Otherwise, you seem to be willing to go
along with the status quo.
— Julius Gordon
Douglaston, NY
