The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Our Dynamic Universe

1.5.05 @ 12:01AM

(Page 3 of 4)

So now we learn a few female soldiers in Iraq are roughing up prisoners and doing other naughty things. So what? The operative word here is "soldiers." Why is it worse for women to do this stuff than men? They're citizens, with a citizen's rights to vote and hold office and own property; hence they have a citizen's obligations, one of which is fighting for the country in time of war. And this group all volunteered, knowing what they were getting into, for which all honor to them.

War means fighting, and fighting is not a nice activity; it means killing people and breaking things, and a risk of death and mutilation. So unless you're a pacifist, which I'm not, I really don't see what you're getting your knickers in a twist about.
-- S.M. Stirling

Indeed, Mr. Gonzales is no Tomas de Torquemada, the First Grand Inquisitor of Spain. Neither was John Ashcroft. But that's irrelevant to the Democrats, liberals and leftists who wish ill to our country and who remain stuck to -- and most comfortable with and unthreatened by -- the Clinton administration's serve-our-enemies-with-legal-papers approach to the war on terror.

It would appear that they would rather sacrifice the public health and welfare domestically, as well as that of our soldiers abroad, rather than embrace that we are fighting a war unlike any other in American history.

Too, it seems they wish to aid and abet our enemies to the fullest through their naive and non-productive political gestures.

For them, whatever occurred at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay is their own flavor of junk-science-founded global warming used by the enviro-wackos to attack America and cause her as much trouble and embarrassment and economic damage as possible.

They have cast themselves as America's enemies.
-- C. Kenna Amos Jr.
Princeton, West Virginia

UNION LABELS
Re: Jay D. Homnick's To Form a More Perfect Union:

Jay Homnick's article describes a union that already exists. Iron workers and most construction unions work on a principle that if our employer doesn't make money with us on a job he doesn't need us (non-union labor). As a conservative union worker who earns every cent he makes in a very dangerous job it always ticks me off that every conservative publication I read lumps all unions together as useless. Government unions and their leaders are portrayed as what unions are all about, when nothing could be further from the truth. Private sector unions are about work and pride in a job well done so in the future you might want to distinguish between the two.
-- Brian Gorham
Ironworker in New York

No, sir, we don't have to put up with what we put up with (I was one of them) over the holiday "sick-out" by baggage handlers. I, for one, am going to ship my normally-checked bag by Federal Express next year and carry on enough to make sure I can live if I have to camp in an airport again. I will have no baggage to handle from now on, except by people who don't believe in that old Canadian motto "the public be damned."
-- Kate Shaw

SUSAN'S SONG
Re: Mark Goldblatt's On the Death of Susan Sontag:

After hearing the echoes of the rapturous obits of Ms. Sontag, and with her heinous words after 9/11 still clear in my mind, I knew I had to read Mr. Goldblatt's piece. I was not disappointed. I venture his short comments are likely the fairest, truest, comments upon her life that have been made. I did not know that she stuck up for Mr. Rushdie, I'll have to factor that in to my future opinion of her. Excellent article, far more well thought out than the lady could have managed on her own behalf. Thanks for publishing this.
-- Jessica O'Connor

Susan Sontag always seemed to me to be the classic, radically chic "liberal" who detested both her country and its mildly conservative society, but who wouldn't live anywhere else for love nor money.
-- Joseph W. Holmes
Cedar Park, Texas

Mr. Goldblatt's piece is generous and gracious, but I think his original characterization of Sontag as a pseudo-intellectual was correct. Sontag was a parasite who drew upon the richness of her culture to develop the argot of intellectualism, and then injected ideological toxins into her host -- which, fortunately, has outlived her, and gives signs of having developed an immunity against, at least, Sontag's particular kind of poison.
-- David Carter

PSEUDOCON HIMSELF?
Re: Justin Obodie's letter (under "Among the Pseudocons") in Reader Mail's Intended Consequences:

Letter to the Editor

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