The American Spectator

Reader Mail

'Twas the Night Before

12.23.05 @ 12:01AM

DON'T BOTHER
Re: Mark Goldblatt's Race, Reason, and Reaching Out:

I watched, very briefly, the hearings in which some victims of Hurricane Katrina spoke about their "experiences" after the storm. It was embarrassing. Where did they find these misfits? Are they representative of the evacuees who left for Houston and other parts of the country? Most of us in Louisiana are struggling to save whatever reputation we have left and then we see these clowns spew their nonsense in front of a congressional hearing. We see their faces plastered all over the media. My neighbors have family members from the 9th Ward living with them. They are fine, hard-working people, who have lost everything. They struggle to put their lives back to what is used to be. What used to be will never happen for them. They have to start all over. I have no sympathy for the dreadlocked crybabies who whined and lied in front of the hearings....
-- Clasina J. Segura
New Iberia, Louisiana

BACKING ISRAEL
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s The Camera Lies:

Thank you for your insightful review of Munich. You have confirmed my suspicions about yet another revision of history by a liberal from Hollywood. I find myself confused, however, in examining the dichotomy between Jewish liberals in the U.S. and the perpetual condemnation of their Israeli homeland and its people. It seems only conservatives here back Israel and her right to defend herself, while the liberal population here (including its Jewish subset) regularly wave their pro-Palestinian flag. Not only does that stance place politics above blood, but it also translates into election after election here at home where the liberal candidate can bank on the Jewish vote almost as much as they can assume the black vote.

What would explain and possibly correct this?

Thank you and Merry Christmas.
-- Todd Gelhaar
Denver, Colorado

Can someone tell me the last time a leftist Hollywood film maker told a TRUE story? They are always tilted left.
-- Elaine Kyle

AN IRVING CHRISTMAS
Re: Mark Gauvreau Judge's Not So Fast, Mr. Meyerson:

Thanks to Mark G. Judge for setting the record straight re Irving Berlin -- I wish I could have met Berlin. Shoot, I wish we had offered to take all the Jews in Russia, lock, stock and barrel. People like Harold Meyerson just can't stand to acknowledge that there just possibly might be another dimension to life than one pictured by Meyerson.
-- Dave Taylor

FLIMSY THEORY
Re: Dan Peterson's What's the Big Deal About Intelligent Design?:

Numerous species that once walked the earth, intelligently designed to hear folks like Dan Peterson (who reaches out with the vast biological knowledge his law degree surely gave him) tell it, are now extinct. This, among many other inconvenient facts (such as notable imperfect design, homologous anatomy, the geographical distribution of species and varieties, etc) is a hard thing for intelligent design supporters to explain, but then again they don't explain anything. Instead their 'theory' is content to point to anything that 'Darwinian evolution' cannot 'fully' prove at the moment (ignore for the fact that Darwinian explanations for such things are at least plausible even in the few areas it has not achieved slam dunk status).

What ID supporters fail to tell folks is that their theory, called the "Theory of Creation" was once the dominant theory at every university and in every journal. However, it became increasingly hard to square with fact after fact after fact, and even though it had every institutional support imaginable, it was surpassed by a theory that made more sense to those who worked in the fields of geology, biology and paleontology. For decades now that theory, called erroneously "Darwinian evolution" at times (since evolution supporters hardly worship Darwin but consistently accept him where correct and challenge him where wrong), has been ascendant. So with such shortsighted hindsight IDers pretend it is they fighting the establishment!

Conservatives have always known that some things cannot be decided by a vote. And science is one of those things. If, as Peterson claims, there is a "flood" of scientific evidence for ID then why must ID proponents seek elected school boards, politicians, and newspaper support to get their theory a hearing? Why not, like proponents of the Big Band (which many thought had religious overtones), don't they convince the scientific community? I submit because they would find, as is the case now, few qualified folks convinced by the flimsy theory. Perhaps until then Peterson and folks like the Discovery Institute can stop wasting precious conservative political capital on such a faulty investment as ID and turn to more pressing subjects such as protection of property rights, judicial activism, immigration reform, and support for intermediate institutions.
-- Prof. Kenneth Wagner
Radford University

What's the big deal about intelligent design? Because at a foundational level it is all about the relationship between the individual and the state. If your order of business is to radically remake society, you instinctively know that it can only be accomplished with the overwhelming power of the state. Once at the controls, you can attempt to reconstruct society to your own notion of justice and right.

But the suggestion that there is a higher power to which the state is accountable means that that there is a competing "agent" to assign meaning to behaviors, actions and things. No self-appointed social engineer wants that because what he pronounces "good" could be over-ruled by the judge of all things as "evil."

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