The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Isn't She Lovely?

8.27.08 @ 12:01AM

(Page 5 of 5)

And let me just say, I love this country. There is nowhere else that I would rather live, and I have been to a few and have never shied away from learning about more. I come from a family with a long history of serving this country in time of need and would be doing the same myself today if it weren't for certain, unavoidable and irreversible physical limitations. I spent my youngest years without my father as he honorably served, and my high school years were spent in the Tidewater of Virginia, soaking in revolutionary history, running around the Yorktown battlefield, and watching recreations of the debates for war and constitution. If my rhetoric is overblown, at least I come by it honestly.

Here's some rhetoric that I've taken to heart: "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces to reduce them [the people] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is there duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." Overstated, indeed.
-- Charles Campbell
Austin, Texas

THIS COULD BE THE LAST TIME
Re: Michael Skaggs's letter (under "Literacy Test") in Reader Mail's Biden His Time:

Now, and for the last time, we turn our attention to Mr. Michael Skaggs and his near frantic search, over these last few days, for vindication.

Mr. Skaggs: During the latter part of the 20th Century, the Peoples Republic of Cuba proudly announced that literacy among the Cuban people had reached 100 percent. That's extremely impressive, until you learn that in Cuba literacy is defined as the ability to sign one's own name and to recognize one's own name when it appears in print.

By most standards, however, and certainly within the industrial democracies, literacy means more than an ability to identify most of the 26 letters of the alphabet and a few of the punctuation marks that govern their usage. By the high standards that guide civilized men, literacy includes at least a passing familiarity with history, literature and philosophy, as well as an ability to extrapolate when one confronts some thing new and unfamiliar.

My point remains what it always has been: (1) I attended a reunion of the Rainbow Division, and (2) the Rainbow Division was made famous by an old Movie called The Fighting 69th. Those two things are true, regardless of "timeframes."

It is funny (sad, but still funny) to hear your claim that you were "'getting it right"..."because of a lack of an included timeframe," in my first letter, and therefore you were not splitting hairs. (For further illumination, consult a dictionary of American idiom. Look under S.)

Your desperate need for victory is reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's periodic efforts to look like a statesman, or Geraldo's demand that he be described as a journalist. When a pink toy poodle tries to chase a mountain lion up a tree, it gets high marks for valor, shrill noise and nervous energy, but that ain't nearly enough.

This is the final time I will speak to this point; it bores everybody but you.
-- Edmund Dantes

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Foreign Policy, John McCain, Economics, Business, Islam, Constitution, Law, Military, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Energy