The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Sorry, Dianne

11.19.07 @ 12:01AM

(Page 3 of 4)

We're in for a bumpy ride,
But it will be fun.
Get out the popcorn
The show's merely begun!
-- Mimi Evans Winship

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK
Re: William Tucker's Let's Move Wall Street:

Don't look now, baby, but the move is already under way.

To Shanghai. PetroChina just had a $1 trillion dollar IPO, and there are plenty of other big ones right behind it.

But, look on the bright side. After hyper-ambitious Democrats have used phony criminal investigations and insane environmental requirements to chase every sane business and entrepreneur out of the country, they will have no choice but to start prosecuting actual criminals for a change.

After all, there'll be nobody else left.
-- Martin Owens
Sacramento, California

Mr. Tucker writes an interesting article here. I have no doubt at all that what he reveals is the Gospel truth. If anything the situation is probably worse than he describes.

Personally, I wouldn't live in New York on a bet, and living in New York City, please, I would rather go to jail. It is, however, my confirmed thesis that folks get the government that they, deep in their heart of hearts, desire and demand and deserve. I have for many decades now thought that you were required to be a masochist to live in New York City. I have a real hard time working up generous amounts of sympathy for the folks that continue to endure New York.

I have a somewhat minor nit to pick, however. Mr. Tucker writes, "New Yorkers are so enamored with their own 'progressivism' that they fail to note the rest of the country has long since zipped by them in making government responsive to voters."

Excuse me, but has he ever heard of New Jersey, or Pennsylvania? How about Chicago, or San Francisco, or the Boston environs of Cambridge, and Amherst, et al. I assume that Mr. Tucker lives in New York. One always sees one's own situation as the worst, and tends to pooh pooh the severity of the situation of those in other cesspools of progressivism. Perhaps Mr. Tucker would prefer to live in Los Angeles or Oakland, California. He would probably love Austin, Texas, or Colorado Springs, Colorado.

I could go on, but I am sure that you take my point. No, Mr. Tucker, the rest of the country has NOT zipped by New York in making government responsive to the folks that have to pay for it. We can't even successfully figure out how to make the federal government consistently responsive to the majority of Americans instead of the noisy minority, much less successfully figure it out for the plethora of state and local governmental units. There is always some new crook, er...I mean politician, to figure out a new scheme to keep them a step ahead of us.
-- Ken Shreve

AT GROUND ZERO
Re: Jackie Mason & Raoul Felder's The 9/11 Blame Game:

Bravo to Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder for "The 9/11 Blame Game." On Sept. 11, before the second plane struck, my brother, Capt. William F. Burke, Jr., of Eng. Co. 21 called family and friends in the city to warn them, "We are under terrorist attack!"

Sometime after 10 AM, when on the 27th floor of WTC 1 and aware of the collapse of WTC 2, he ordered the successful evacuation of his men (by radio; it worked) and that of Eng. Co. 21 and the civilians they help save. He stayed to assist Ed Beyea and Abe Zelmanowitz, co-workers and friends at Empire Blue Cross. Ed was a quadriplegic and Abe would not leave him behind. Somehow they got to about the 21st floor. There they called family and friends. Ed's family called Abe's; they were "with a fireman and on the way down." The woman Billy called begged him to be safe. "This is my job," he told her, "this is who I am." Minutes later WTC 1 collapsed and Ed, Abe and Capt. Billy Burke perished with the other 2,746 innocents, Sept. 11, 2001.

ON 9/11, Billy immediately understood and recognized the threat and acted. Of course we must study the events of 9/11 and learn from our many mistakes, before, during and after. However, we are not the bad guys; they are. It was not NORAD, or the CIA or the FBI, it was not the buildings or the radios or Bush or Clinton. It was the terrorists.
-- Michael Burke
Bronx, New York

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