The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Explosive Events

6.9.06 @ 12:01AM

(Page 4 of 4)

In the 1840s the Whigs were conciliatory and wishy-washy on slavery, so some principled people broke off and formed the Republicans. For twenty years we were a one issue party, pushing the evils of slavery into the limelight until it was dealt with. During the 1860s we were into the issue of reuniting the Union, first by the Civil War, and then by the Reconstruction. These didn't go perfectly, but it was better than what would have been if we had done nothing. During the 1880s we were a one issue party on civil service reform. And we got it reformed. Local party bosses stopped being allowed to decide federal postings in their area.

For a long time after that we were not known for anything. In the 1960s the Democrats were a one-issue party focused on civil rights. And fortunately, they won. Then Reagan got in office during the 1980s and we were a one-issue party toward national security and defeating communism. Under Bush "41" the Berlin Wall came down. Communism finally fell. We lost our focus. We need one galvanizing issue.

I'd pick the issue of abortion myself, I can't think of anything else as evil as slavery, except maybe the peonage of illegal immigrants and how little we do to prevent the inhumane methods some choose to go through to get here. We don't have to toss aside our beliefs on the other things, but we do need to put one thing to the front and say "This evil must not be allowed to go on."
-- Troy Harmon

I love Ben Stein and have been a fan for years but I'm quickly becoming unenthusiastic. His suggestion of "an agonizing reappraisal of whether we should be in Iraq at all" is nonsense. Reading it, I yelled the observation Festus made about and to St. Paul, "[T]hou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad." The reasons we went to Iraq were and are solid. Even if we didn't find WMD, we don't know that he didn't have them or wasn't getting them, only that they're apparently not there now. We know for a fact he had them in 1998 and there is evidence and testimony that they were still there and loved to Syria while we were wasting time consulting the so-called "International Community" at the U.N. What should we reappraise? That we should have adopted the lawyer's locution to wait until we were persuaded beyond all reasonable doubt?

Nobody wants to stay there as every G.I. is a walking bull's-eye. We can't just, as John Kerry often insinuates, up and leave the place to implode back into another third world chamber pot. Left coast kooks and their anything but hip protest signs notwithstanding, our blood is worth Iraqi oil if the sales of it fund Wahhabi extremists who want to buy and detonate a nuclear device here. The only other option is a gradual pullout, which is precisely what we're doing. If conservatives were to ignore logic and have this agonizing reappraisal, we would be (falsely) discrediting ourselves and turning future foreign policy over to the likes of Michael Moore and Al Franken. Perhaps Ben should reappraise how secure we'd if his Hollywood pals were in control of foreign policy and the United States were just an extension of anti-Semitic, criminally ineffective and doomed Europe.
-- Steve Slick
Texas

EASY TO DIGEST
Re: Clinton Taylor's Hard to Digest and Nancy Carothers's letter ("The Real Digest") in Reader Mail's Who We Are:

Kudos to Clinton Taylor for his article on the Reader's Digest, and I enjoyed reading Nancy Carothers's interesting reflections. I spent 40 years as a staff writer and roving editor for the Digest, spent a lot of time on the Washington scene and can attest that Bill Schulz and Ralph Kinney Bennett produced a great deal of outstanding work. So did many others. The Digest was deeply engaged in America and the world; if anything important was going on anywhere, or threatening to happen, or had happened, we were there. I believe that we developed the most effective journalistic institution in the world. DeWitt Wallace, the magazine's founder and longtime editor-in-chief insisted on it, and provided us with all the support we needed to make it so. The day he brought me on staff he said, "You have an air travel card and an expense account; if you have to go to Timbuktu to get a paragraph to make a story right, then you have to go to Timbuktu. You don't have to ask anyone around here for permission. When you're putting a story together, you're the boss. You go where you have to go and do what you have to do." He said the same thing, in different words, perhaps, to all his writers. How could the magazine not become the influential organ that he made it?

Mr. Taylor proposes that the Digest was a conservative magazine when, other than the Wall Street Journal, the rest national media was not. Perhaps. In fact, liberals occupied some powerful positions in the Digest's editorial hierarchy, and a number of writers (myself not included) were convinced liberals; we had our share of donnybrooks. I think that what made the magazine as successful and good as it was that it was devoted in all that it did to the well-being of America and the world, and to a rigid adherence to the truth. Clearly, if your readership wants to know about the important things that are going on in America and the world and knows that it can count on everything you tell it, you are conservative.

Mr. Taylor bets that if Claudia Rosett had the kind of support we had, "we would soon be seeing U.N. bureaucrats by the dozen led from the edifice in shackles." I can't help but believe that if DeWitt Wallace were alive and kicking, we would be seeing crowds of people, editors and others, from the "business side," leaving the Digest's offices and grounds with boxes full of their belongings, wondering where to look for work.
-- John G. Hubbell
Minnetonka, Minnesota

OUT OF IT
Re: Mark Tooley's Fellow Methodist Demands Bush Impeachment:

Sad that the Mr. Winkler is so out of touch with the members of United Methodist Church.
-- Ken

DANA L., ESQ.
Re: Doug Bandow's "I Just Had to Do It":

I went and read the original piece in the Post. I sat there thinking, "How can any adult be such a simpering, irresponsible victim?" Then I got to the bottom. Dana L is a trained professional when it comes to diverting responsibility -- she's a lawyer. "Your Honor -- It's never my, or my client's, fault!" 'Nuff said.
-- Gary
Washington

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Foreign Policy, Trade, Hillary Clinton, Television, Business, Islam, Abortion, Hollywood, Constitution, Law, Iraq, Russia, NATO, Communism, Immigration, Oil