The American Spectator

HAIL TO THE CHIEF
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell’s What Terrible Things Were Done:

Mr. Tyrrell, I’ve always loved you (gusting to pure adoration after such landmarks as The American Spectator’s cover of a mouse-size Jimmy Carter trying to climb into the huge presidential picture frame and your book The Liberal Crackup).

Beautiful and timely article today.
— Hilda Hardcastle
Bath, Maine

Editor Tyrrell’s experience of learning about the holocaust brought back vivid memories. As he, I attended a Catholic grammar school in the early '50s and was also less than a perfect gentleman in class and often got sent out for discipline. But we didn’t have a library with magazines, just a hallway in which to stand at attention. My dad was an editor of a small town paper and interested in everything national, political and cultural. My mother was well educated and a published poet. So we had books and magazines at home, including Look and Life and many others. So I perused those photos of German camps at home, in my livingroom, sitting in my Dad’s leather recliner (the only luxury he allowed himself). And, luckily, I had parents who took the time to discuss those horrible, horrible pictures with me, my brother and sisters.

The conversation extended from the living room before dinner, right through dinner. The conversation was about Evil. And that it has to be opposed. Quickly. Without waiting. My Dad was especially eloquent about the political delays in the U.S. about entering that fight about that particular evil and how many of those people may not have suffered at all had we the backbone to face the difficulties earlier.

Here we are, many years later, facing similar choices.

Regards For a Great Magazine,
— Peter Hughes
Sacramento, California

After 85 years of deepest suffering, Ukraine is trying to break permanently free of Leninism/Stalinism. It would be a great time for a true historical movie of the forced starvation of 10 to 16 million innocent Orthodox and Roman Catholic Ukrainian peasants and kulaks by Stalin.

Mel Gibson could do it justice.

The Ukrainian holocaust was known by all European governments, feared by most Europeans. It was a precursor and benchmark for Hitler and his death camps.

The Ukrainian holocaust, in its two years of brutal and savage life, probably killed more people than died in Hitler’s death camps. Fear of Communism and Stalin, and what was done in the Ukraine, led people like the Germans to opt for Nazis over Reds. They soon found out it was a Hobson’s Choice.

Ukraine could use a great movie at this time!
— Jack Brennan
Pearl River, New York

PRESS PASSES
Re: Wlady Pleszczynski’s Bush Among the Morans:

You wrote:

To make matters worse, Bush called on several reporters whose questions could only have come from by the White House communications office. Most famously, Jeff Gannon of the openly Republican Talon News mocked recent comments by Democrats Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton before asking Bush how was he “going to work with [such] people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?” Did Ronald Reagan ever enjoy such a friendly query?

The press corps never said a kind word to or about Reagan until he was rolling up Constitution Avenue in June 2004.

And the answer I got from the President was that he was, like Reagan, going to go around the Dems and the media and go right to the American people who seem to understand what he is saying when the filter is removed. The results of November’s election show that.

Thanks again for the plug. My hate mail from the Left is off the scale.
— Jeff Gannon

Hear, hear! Excuse me for admitting to laughing out loud at your clever use of ABC’s Terry Moran’s name in the subject of your column! And your further description of him as “prissy” allowed another chuckle. I’m so glad to have witnessed President Bush’s performance at yesterday’s press conference — as I missed it live and had to make an effort to view it on C-Span later in the evening. Here’s hoping that Bush will call more pressers!
— Cathy Thorpe
Columbus, Georgia

Following your article on the growing irrelevancy of the White House press corps, I am wondering if this advances beyond just President Bush’s barely concealed contempt for them.

Hugh Hewitt properly makes the point that the establishment press is on the demise. I would then logically ask why these press conferences are held with the establishment press in the first place.

I think that a properly held webcast with vetted bloggers would meet more appropriately the present needs of the populace. Of course, the questions would probably be far more pointed and out of control, but we would get questions framed in such a manner that educates the populace instead of endlessly whitewashing or propagandizing either way.

For example, the townhall-style second debate during the last election was one of the most edifying political questioning I have ever seen. The questions were framed carefully by citizen participants and these educated as well as required the debater to respond to the issues normal Americans are concerned about (versus the Fourth Estate) — even though many times they didn’t answer the question. The question pertaining to adult stem cell research versus embryonic cell research immediately raised the question of the efficacy of embryonic stem cell research, whereas the press had continually suppressed this issue since they consider it solely an issue of abortion and framing anti-abortionists as trying to bury science, i.e. being extreme nativists.

Also, the woman who rightly asked what the candidate would do for people who saw abortion as murder. This immediately made anti-abortionists legitimate i.e. we have a valid ethical question worthy of open debate.

My point being that the Fourth Estate has long ago lost its ability (or avoids its responsibility) to ask the right questions and therefore, pass on the right information. Many of us who have been treated as extremists in the public light are hungry for another medium of information exchange and debate. This is still a largely unmet need that is only being met on the web.
— Joel Farrier

It is about time someone took those morons in the White House press pool to the wood shed…and who better than the man they love to hate….Pres. Bush. Those press/media vultures are so smug and complacent and think they “deserve” the inside track…make them work for their information…maybe then they will take more time and consideration deciding whether a story is accurate. The best part is that it was in public…their spanking! The President was just treating them like they treat their readers and subscribers.
— L. Anaya
El Paso, Texas

Enjoyed the Moran article.
— Francis Miller

If you act like idiots and ask idiotic questions, you get treated like idiots. And he got a couple of them pretty good yesterday. What you have to see, is the mentality of the questioners. They don’t ask important questions, they ask gotcha questions. Their sole objective is to GET HIM. Catch him in a lie. Force him to say he is wrong. They are just like the lefties. And if you fail in this endeavor, then, you make one up, like Dan Rather and his crew. And you know what, there are over half of us in this country that feel this is wrong. Most of the young, aggressive white house reporters think that they are going to end up in an anchor chair some day. What helped Dan Rather’s career. Treating Richard Nixon like a normal man on the street and showing no respect for the presidency. But it may be too late for them, because the jig is up. We don’t have to listen to their view anymore. There are too many other ways to get the news other then listen to a bunch of eager beavers that will stoop to anything to get ahead.
— Sid Morris

Another fine piece by Wlady as usual. Unfortunately, there appears to be a typo. I think he meant to spell it out as “Terry Moron of ABC News.” A little more in line with the general run of play.
— Jim Bjaloncik
Stow, Ohio

Fortunately mules are smarter than most of the so-called journalists in the so called press corps President Bush is just returning the contempt most of them feel for him. Actually it is mostly a waste of time for the President to have a press conference and a waste of time to watch them, except for laughs.
— Howard Lee
Bogalusa, Louisiana

I watched the Bush news conference while having breakfast at the neighborhood diner here in a Detroit suburb. I have to wonder what some of those idiots in the White House Press Corps were thinking. Wife-beating, ambush, arrogant questions directed at the President — any President — do not bring credit to journalism. Or even to partisanship. ABC ought to not just reassign Moran, maybe to some hellhole, but just get it over with and fire him outright. And the MSM wonder why their credibility and revenues are sliding!
— Michael Davis

I can’t be the only conservative in America who watched the president wade into the shark tank yesterday and thought to himself, “This is just stupid, why on earth would anyone continue to do this?”

What I am of course referring to is the fact that the presidential press pool is currently composed of a sundry collection of marxists, socialists, feminazis, flaming liberals, DNC fax machines, and Michael Moore fans with giant egos and press badges. Worse, they are all seething over their recent defeat and would happily tear the president limb from limb if they thought the secret service would let them. Every “question” they posed yesterday was actually a statement which grew out of the defective and untrue presuppositions of their worldview that they simply demanded the president react to. They might as well have sat there and asked things like: “Mr. so-called-President, many Nazis were categorized as ‘evil geniuses,’ you on the other hand are quite stupid. Can you explain that? Did you miss the necessary classes in the training course?” and so on.

What is the point of doing this? All that it accomplishes is getting him to seething boil, which is inevitably the point from which clips will be produced. The net effect is that viewers of the press-conference “bites” on CNN, ABC, SeeBS, etc. see a defensive, angry, and taciturn president without realizing he’s just been peppered with buckshot from a group of fifth columnists who have never done or thought anything even vaguely conservative in their entire lives and who view voting Republican as one step shy of committing genocide. The current press pool isn’t representative of anything except the socialist, anti-theist intelligentsia (now there’s a misnomer if there ever was one) from which it was spawned and they have generally never rubbed shoulders with anything remotely resembling a genuine American peasant from “fly-over country.” They have far more in common with Parisians than people from Missouri.

Why not simply purge the White House press pool (no, I don’t mean in the Stalinist sense) to remove the obvious lefties from the old media shrinking circulation and influence outlets in the same way sane people remove Piranhas when they are found in ponds? Start replacing them with reporters from the new media, make sure NR, the Spectator, and the Standard, are represented in the press pool — heck start pulling in guys from the more widely read blogs! I know that the Washington Post and NYT would go ballistic if their hacks were shown the door….

There simply is nothing left to lose, it’s all upside from here…
— Andy Webb
Fayetteville, North Carolina

Bada Bing or words to that effect.
— Evelyn Palmeri
Flagler Beach, Florida

Thanks for coming down hard on the behavior of the despicable lout from ABC, Terry MorOn. He and his fellow press corps toads deserve all of the derision we can heap upon them. Keep it coming.

P.S. Your article is a big hit at lucianne.com.
— Mary Daly

Great article!
— Doug Santo
Pasadena, California

Seems this guy [Ali Hatari] has a history of run-ins with the Jordanian Government. (Click here and here.)

Maybe he’s like some of the moonbats here in the U.S. who like to push things until they get arrested, just to get their name in the headlines.
— Jay Evans
York, Pennsylvania

WINNING ABORTION TRIANGULATION
Re: George Neumayr’s Safe, Legal, and Hillary:

I would like to suggest that every mother of a young child who is also pro-life buy a T-shirt for her baby/toddler inscribed, “My mom is pro-life — thanks mom!”

That would get the baby killers’ attention.
— Annette Cwik

A wonderful analysis. In a confluence technological change the development of the sonogram maybe the undoing of the abortion movement. With the new digital sonograms, a fetus of 6-8 weeks as small as it is develops features that show a developing human form.

That is giving some women pause. That knowledge is becoming common with the possible effect that many are realizing that abortion is not a convenience but a death. Which I surmise is the reason the abortion crowd is mounting the campaign. But looking at the video display in real-time is hard to dismiss out of hand regardless of all the propaganda to the contrary.
— John McGinnis
Arlington, Texas

Regarding “Safe, Legal, and Hillary” — if this is the best that the pro-abort crowd can come up with then we have won. It is not time for us to rest on our laurels but to press even harder for the right to life of the unborn. There have been too many horror stories about what abortion does to the woman (we already know what it does to the child) for the American people to respond to “positive” testimonials about an abortion. All I can say is thank you Jesus.
— Jim Bednarek

Regarding George Neumayr’s article on the push to make abortion safe, legal and fun; we need only go to the source of life. Proverb 8:26 tells us, “All those who hate Me love death.” These people enjoy killing babies because they worship at the altar of death, just so long as it isn’t there own. That also explains why pro abortion and anti death penalty sentiments co-exist so easily. After all if the guy on death row deserves a date with Old Sparky for killing an adult then what do they deserve for the desire to kill a defenseless infant?

The Jews discovered, upon entering Canaan, assorted tribes engaged in the grossest sexual immorality, nature worship and child sacrifice. Does that sound any different than the country of NAMBLA, PETA and NARAL? They are all just various forms of ballroom dancing with death. It brings to mind another verse. Ecclesiastes 1:9, “That which has been is what will be, that which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” The people on Imnotsorry.net probably think they are expressing a new and refreshing point of view, but the sentiment is as old as a fellow named Cain. Am I my brother’s keeper? The answer is supposed to be “yes,” not “put your feet in the stirrups”.
— Brian Bonneau

PENSION ANGINA
Re: David Hogberg’s Bias: A Personal Account:

For the life of me I can’t figure out how private accounts are going to save Social Security. The only thing I can figure out is that this action will eventually kill social security while creating more federal debt. Before leaping into this, it might be a good idea to research Great Britain’s plan since they went to partial privatization.

I have absolutely no stake in this as I am not illegible to collect my deceased husband’s 30-plus years of contributions. This is because I collect a state pension. Perhaps one solution would be to have all senators and representatives forgo their social security since they too collect a public pension. Another idea is to eliminate the cap on collection.
— Cynnie Hauser

Mr. Hogberg accurately and fluently brings to our attention the liberal tactic of discrediting conservative ideas and principles by comparing them with theoretical ideals. In comparing limited personal investment of what is now bled into Social Security and gobbled up by the congressional big spenders with the theoretically perfect yet unreachable retirement benefit, he starkly reveals exactly how liberals attack imperfect but improved measures of the status quo. If someone came up with a medicine that severely limited the tremors accompanying Parkinson’s Disease, liberals would attack it because it did not cure the disease completely. Their arguments are not only illogical, but usually also ridiculous.
— Joseph Baum
Newton Falls, Ohio

THE SLOW DEATH OF AN ELEPHANT
Re: “Spectero Delenda Est!” in Reader Mail’s We Have Seen the Enemy:

I read this thread on your Letters page with interest, tinged with sadness (Letters, January 27).

I have absolutely nothing to gain or prove — I’m not a U.S. citizen, taxpayer or even resident — but the content of this thread bears out something that’s been troubling me for some time.

The actions of George W. Bush and the leadership of the Republican Party are killing it stone dead.

They are repeating the same mistakes made by the Conservative Party in my country when led by Margaret Thatcher and then John Major in the 1980s and 1990s. A group of “conservatives” achieved overwhelming political control, real power — and then get drunk on it. They then become so far detached from the base that their subsequent hubris has now rendered them unelectable.

There is no “conservative” movement in the UK. I desperately want to vote for the Conservatives, the party my family have supported for four generations, but it has become so cynical and power-hungry that there is not a single “conservative” issue on which we agree. I refuse to vote for the demagogues of the United Kingdom Independence Party. I refuse to vote for the racists of the British National Party. Last time I went into the booth, I opted for a small party called Operation Christian Vote, organized by a group of evangelical pastors. Those guys at least tried to talk my language, and it was the most satisfying vote I’ve ever cast.

If the Republicans continue in the way they’re doing, how many more people will be feeling the same way in 2008 or 2012? Probably the same number who’ll have worked out that the Republicans aren’t conservatives — they’re Republicans. And by that time, there will be nothing that can be done to fix the problem. GOP-RIP.
— Martin Kelly
Glasgow, Scotland

RARE AND LEGAL!
Re: Michael Tobias’s letter (under “The Front Royal Test”) in Reader Mail’s We Have Seen the Enemy:

Mr. Tobias, like most of the extremist “pro-lifers” is long on rhetoric, using words like “kill” and “murder,” but has nothing to offer in the way of solutions. Does he really think that if the SCOTUS strikes down Roe v. Wade that the abortions will stop? Prohibition hasn’t worked with the war on drugs, and that is a good indicator of what will happen if abortion is outlawed. The anti-abortion activists have been making the same obtuse and morally superior argument for more than 30 years with few results. Mr. Tobias, if you are really interested in having a positive impact on abortion, find a woman that is thinking about getting one and offer to adopt the child if she will refrain from have an abortion. Try actually doing something about the problem instead of sermonizing about it. You can be anti-abortion and still actually do something besides whine and pass judgment the women who have them. See, it really ISN’T a binary issue!
— Ben Berry
Washington, D.C.

MISSED COVERAGE
It is extremely disappointing that the day after 30 Marines and 1 Navy Corpsman die in a helicopter crash, 4 Marines are killed in an ambush and 2 soldiers were killed in battle, that the Spectator has no coverage on it.

Rather, a variety of political stories instead.

I expected a lot more from a conservative news site. I guess as long as there are people like Hillary and John Kerry to make fun of, you don’t need to cover the finest men this country has to offer. In Thursday’s New York Post, Ralph Peters talks about the fact that the Marines have been notoriously under-funded. Peters states that the CH-53 Super Stallion, the helicopter that crashed, is part of an aging fleet of helicopters that has been around since 1966. Peters suggests that our land forces have been neglected for far too long.

I’ve read more about Tsunami relief than I care to. How about helping our troops? Where are the corporate donations now?

If you support the troops, then cover the troops. I think they’ve earned it.
— Pete Beston
New York, New York