The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Time Travel

8.4.06 @ 12:01AM

ON THE ROAD AGAIN
Re: Eric Peters's Boxed-In Beauties:

Perhaps it would be more fun if we could all drive as fast as people in Europe can drive. I for one love beautiful fast cars. But when you look inside what most people are driving today, perhaps it doesn't matter anymore. Personally I believe that the saddest sight of modern times is those parents who have bought the huge SUV with the DVD player on board, so their lumpen offspring can be carted through some of the most beautiful and enthralling countryside the world has ever produced, with their eyes glued to the same poo-fart-drop-your-pants trash they'd be glued to if they were sitting at home on their beds. Why bother to take your children anywhere if you're going to lock them in a box of Same Old Same Old for the duration of the journey?

Yes, in Olden Times when cars held more people in the back seat, children were allowed in the front seat, and there was no "entertainment" on board except for the load of library books and the radio controlled by Mama, travel was more of a strain and one had to actually acknowledge the presence of siblings and learn to read a map so as to avoid asking "are we there yet?" more than twice an hour. But when we arrived at the Tourist Court, the Motel or the Cabins for the evening we knew we had made a journey and we knew where we were. Today's kids might just as well be left locked in their bedrooms with the curtains drawn as carted down a featureless Interstate to a generic motel, having spent the whole day staring at a screen and deafening themselves in isolation with iPods. Not only do they not know where they have been or where they are, they don't even know if anybody else was traveling with them. And it surely doesn't matter to them how fast their parents got to drive.
-- Kate Shaw, Editor
RFM Sports

At the current rates, we will double the length of our highways in 363 years, but the population will double in 66 years. Governors and highway departments are obsessing over how to get more sales and property tax out of highway construction. These considerations are detrimental to mobility and safety. The idea that highway departments are suppose to be planning and designing for mass mobility of our real mass transit system, the car, seems to be ripped out of the engineering curriculum to make room for too much concern about the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act.

We need a financially sustainable balance between roads to new destinations, like new homes and roads to old destinations, like where we work. What must be done is to increase the capacity of the existing system. The car is worth the costs. How many people were evacuated from Mississippi or Louisiana on the trains?
-- Danny L. Newton
Cookeville, Tennessee

Although the traffic situation in my locale isn't quite as bad as the metropolitan areas mentioned in the article, I have learned to love to play in the traffic with my new Mustang GT convertible. In my younger days, speed was the thing. Now, I find that "quick" is a lot more fun. Between that and sticking to the back roads, I can get my car freak addiction taken care of quite nicely and I worry less about meeting the local ticket writers.
-- J.W. Purcell, 1SG, USA (ret)
Nashville, Tennessee

The clogged-all-day condition of highways and roads in our metropolitan areas is a strong argument, just one of many, against greatly increased immigration. And that's why George Bush should get up one of these weekday mornings, leave the Secret Service and the bullet-proof Caddy behind, borrow some underling's wheels, and spend rush hour tooling around the Washington Beltway. Then let him try to explain to us why we need tens of millions more people in this country.
-- C. Vail

MAN OF STEEL
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s Cool Under Pressure:

Bret Stephens like most civilians, journalists and Americans just doesn't get it -- once the shooting starts all war plans change. When you have great fighting forces (as the U.S. and Israel have), the next most important thing needed is a Commander-in-Chief with "steel." The United States and in a sense Israel have that in George W. Bush. No President since Lincoln has faced more "subversive" opposition in a time of war than President Bush, but like Lincoln Bush has remained firm in his resolve to win. As one who has served I thank God for President Bush. Fault him for what you like, but he is a great Commander-in-Chief.
-- Michael Tomlinson
Crownsville, Maryland

Bush got this one right, for sure! I'm very tired of the Muslim trick of attacking the US or Israel then screaming for a cease fire as soon as we respond. Apparently, that was Saddam Hussein's grand strategy when we invaded in Iraq in 2003. The sole point of the game is to make them look big and brave in the eyes of other Muslims. Victory, in their twisted minds, is not defeating Israel, or the U.S., but merely survival. If Israel kills every last Hezbollah fighter but one, he will declare victory and Israel defeated. They've played this game for half a century and it's time we ended it.
-- Roger D. McKinney
Broken Arrow, Oklahoma

Seems to me the last President we have had that wanted to really WIN a war was Truman -- yes, a Democrat. Even though Bush would love to win, he is not giving the service men and women the go-ahead to GIT'ER DONE.
-- Elaine Kyle

You are either blind, or sympathetic to the neo-cons as most journalists are (if they want to get ahead, that is.)
-- unsigned

RAHM RAISINS
Re: Jeffrey Lord's The Emanuel Brothers' Mel Bonding:

The brothers Emanuel's outrage is all show. If Mel's drunken diatribe is so intolerable to them why aren't they offended by the sober anti-Semitism of America's Joseph Goebbels -- Michael Moore? Could it be because Ari represents Moore in Hollywood? When is Rahm going to condemn Hezbollah loving John Dingle and demand he and the other terrorist loving anti-Semite Democrats resign their seats in Congress? For that matter when are they going to make an ad thanking President Bush for reversing the anti-Semitic attitudes of the Carter and Clinton administrations? If Rahm and Ari took their "partisan sheets" off they'd see the majority of anti-Semites aren't alcoholic actors, but the base of their party (Democrats).
-- Michael Tomlinson
Crownsville, Maryland

Excellent article.

Letter to the Editor

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Sports, Islam, Environment, Books, Hollywood, Movies, Constitution, Law, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, NATO, Fascism, Immigration