END OF A BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s How
Very French:
R. Emmett Tyrrell is easily as indispensable to the conservative
cause as anyone, not excluding Bill Buckley and Brent Bozell. "How
Very French" is hilarious and accurate, and puts me in mind of
National Review Online Editor Jonah Goldberg's description
of the French as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys." Rock on, Mr.
Tyrrell.
-- Jim Williams
San Antonio, TX
Your remarks regarding the French are very disturbing. How dare you
make fun of the French and their cologne. If you bathed as often as
the average Frenchman you would need you cologne as well. Vive
la France and pass the can of Glade.
-- Ed Callahan
Would it be excessive for President Bush to recall our ambassadors
to France and Germany for "consultations"? How about thereafter,
declaring their ambassadors personas non grata? Or, would that be
like using a baseball bat to swat flies?
-- Dick Lambert
Eagle Rock, VA
MINDING MANDELA
Re: Michael Craig's Half
Asleep and Half Nelson:
Michael Craig suggest that Nelson Mandela might be a paid
lobbyist for Qaddafi, Hussein, Arafat, and Castro. My intuition
tells me that Boy Clinton might be writing the scripts for the old
fool!
-- Jack Hughes
Chicago, IL
Regarding Michael Craig's anti-Arab, pro-war rant against Nelson Mandela and Jimmy Carter:
It is the sign of personal and cultural immaturity to think that those who are not for us are against. It is even the sign of immaturity to think that those who disagree are not deserving of respect when they choose to voice disagreement.
I state this to anyone in the United States who is for the war against Iraq: setting aside for the moment the hypocrisy of a government hell bent on going to war against an oil-rich country with minimal evidence of direct or indirect threat or connection to a threat against the United States, but too afraid to confront a very real nuclear threat by a dictator who is in fact ready to bring a region to war against an ally of ours,
If you want war so badly, go sign up and fight. Otherwise, you
are a
coward and a hypocrite.
-- David Hester
TWO PARTIES, TWO AUTHORS
Re: Jackie Mason & Raoul Felder's A
Perfect Prescription for Disaster:
The authors have diagnosed the problem correctly (constant, inflexible opposition to anything the President does) but have assigned it to the wrong cause (the two-party system).
Our system of government was designed to make it difficult to do much; the Founding Fathers were deeply suspicious of a central government that could take away their hard-won freedoms. The real problem is political partisanship run amok; what some of them referred to as a spirit of excessive faction. The two-party system is a part of the problem since it only presents two choices; any third choice is irrelevant.
Mason & Fielder offer no solution to the problem they have described and present the scenario of someone needing medicine as an issue that the federal government must take over with no awareness that some of us might not agree.
The problem of excessive partisanship is one of character and organizational culture; it can best be dealt with at the ballot box by not voting for the candidates of a party that practices it. This may have played a part in making Tom Daschle Minority Leader of the Senate.