The American Spectator

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Adventures With Andrew

6.26.06 @ 12:01AM

(Page 3 of 5)

In the column, "California on Four Billion Dollars," Jay Homnick wrote the following two sentences:

The proximate cause of my peregrinations was the nuptials on Monday evening of a great friend of this column, Barry Ingber. (Note to purists: If "nuptials" is the singular, then "was" is correct in that sentence.)

The first sentence was correct, but his defense of it in the parenthetical sentence was not. The 'was' in the first sentence is singular because the subject of the sentence, 'cause', is singular, not because of the word 'nuptials".
-- Marco Pizer

THE COMMON THREAD
Re: Friday's edition of Spectator.org:

As I read through the various articles on Friday's menu, I was tempted to write in response to several of them. As usual, I resisted the temptation until I had finished perusing the entire slate of offerings. It was then that I seemed to detect a common thread running through the lot of them.

The thread that I detected is that America is no more. Oh, there is still a land mass with a significant population in the geographical place the we used to call America, but America is gone. The articles of belief and principles of government upon which this once great country was founded, are not only no longer cherished by a majority of the populace, they are actively derided and declared evil.

Mr. Orlet makes a convincing case for the notion that the United States and it's citizens are reviled in just about every corner of the world, even though we have spent huge amounts of our blood and treasure to help these same nations and peoples. But most importantly, Mr. Orlet makes a convincing case for the proposition that the majority of our own citizens now look on our leaders as antagonistic to their beliefs and interests. If I were Ann Coulter, I would aver that we have become a nation of wimpy little appeasing cowards with the attention spans of a two year old spoiled brat. Entirely too many of our citizens consider it too difficult and painful to smack the bullies upside the head with a 2X4 and force them to go pick on someone else.

Mr. Newman next takes up the gauntlet and discusses Mr. Sullivan's crusade to totally redefine Christianity and to orchestrate a set of rules that will remove the entire body of traditional Christian religion and principles from our public spaces. (And probably private also as the next step.) Folks, like it or not, America was founded as a Christian nation that consciously would allow the adherents of any other religion extant in the world to worship according to their own rules and practices within our borders. Regardless of the new history, all of our founding fathers were non-pacifist Christians. America was birthed and baptized in the blood of revolution and war. Many of those that took up arms were non-Christians that came on board because of their soon to be right to worship in their own way. Nevertheless, no one would have seriously considered the possibility of banning Christianity from the public square. And yes, that does include the moral codes that formed the basis of the Judeo-Christian Bible.

Next, Mr. Hogberg discusses the attempt by a craft union, the American Medical Association, to convince the federal government to force, yes force, our citizens to spend their own legally earned money in a particular way that would benefit the membership of said union. The scary thing is that we have one of the two large political parties that favors this very proposal, and some in the other party that do also. We also have respectable, supposedly, groups telling us what we should eat in order that we shall weigh what they think we should weigh. These same groups demonize parents that dare to feed their own children in a manner that the food fanatics do not approve. Other groups have succeeded in forcing the secession of usage of a legal product (tobacco) in public, but do not have the courage to fight to get the produce declared illegal. Now the push in on to restrict the public from using the product in their own homes or cars. These same groups seem to see nothing wrong in smoking marijuana. Consistency, they do not know the concept. I could go on and on with examples of groups attempting, successfully or not, to force free adult citizens to alter, restrict, or cease legal behavior. Was America founded on the idea of a nanny state with groups of elite snobs and do-gooders telling everyone else what to do? Does no one remember the experience we had with allowing a bunch of do-gooders to tell adult Americans what they could and could not drink in the first half of the 20th Century? Has it become against the law for people to mind their own business?

I will wrap up our tour de force with Mr. Tooley's article chronicling the efforts of one religious denomination to force a change of self--defense strategies by a sovereign nation half a world away. True Mr. Tooley mentions that other groups were, to one degree or another, trying to achieve the same ends, but he concentrates on the one group that traveled furthest down the road. So here in the United States, we have a religious group that insists on their right to worship as they please and transact church business with equality under the law, yet they are quite content to violate one of the founding principles, the principle of mind your own business.

I could go on citing examples of the ways that America has strayed from the founding principles until this became the length of a master's level thesis, but I am already overlong. My point being that, since I am well into the senior citizen category, every day I see another of America's founding ideas and ideals being left by the wayside, while a huge percentage of our citizens race full bore toward a utopian Socialism -= precisely what people came here to escape for the better part of four centuries. Damn shame! I am glad that I will not be here to see the final governmental decree when that once great idea called America is officially declared null and void.
-- Ken Shreve
Proud to be an old timey American

ON BOARD
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s Lords of Self-Discipline:

During WWII our Lefties were on board because we were allied with the USSR. If Roosevelt had not taken this tack (in my view, a disastrous and amoral decision) you can be certain that the oppositionists would have had much the same stridence as we see today, modified for the lesser extent to which the Democrats were explicitly socialist.
-- Ken Watson

Your column falls below even your usually low standards for rhetorical honesty and competence. To compare Bush to Roosevelt and the mess in Iraq to WWII fails at the outset. Their are simply no parallels between either the men or the conflicts. I could spend all day shooting holes in your thesis, but two large caliber shots will suffice. First FDR was elected 4 times by overwhelming majorities. Bush has possibly been elected once by the thinnest of pluralities. Second WWII was a fight for national survival, Iraq is a personal vendetta by Bush and his paranoid cronies against the "man that tried to kill my daddy." All conclusions drawn from your base comparison are null and void, but you know that. You are being deliberately dishonest in order to make money by the rhetorical equivalent of throwing feces from your cage of indefensible "conservatism" at moral, informed and patriotic Americans. Remember that you will be called to account for your actions on this earth. I will pray for you.
-- B. Gantt
Jacksonville, Florida

I agree with Mr. Tyrrell's musings regarding Mr. Rumsfeld, and write to add that perhaps it's time Mr. Bush started penning the narrative citation for his beleaguered but constant SecDef's Medal of Freedom.
-- J. C. Eaton
Chetek, Wisconsin

LOSING THE HOMEFRONT
Re: Paul Beston's Where's the Outrage?:

Various media outlets have been stating, "The two American soldiers who were captured by the insurgents were, tortured and slaughtered like farm animals." There is something that is very wrong with that statement. Because farm animals that are to be slaughtered for food are treated with much more dignity and humility than what was offered from the depraved barbarity that those two American soldiers had to suffer through from the Islamic jihadists who desecrated those soldiers bodies so severely that it took DNA samples to identify them.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Business, Religion, Catholicism, Islam, Constitution, Law, Founding Fathers, Military, Iraq, NATO, Socialism, Conservatism, Oil