The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Panic City

9.23.08 @ 12:01AM

(Page 3 of 5)

To reiterate -- every system denies medical care to some because of the expense. The only question is: "do you want to decide what's too expensive, or do you want someone else to decide for you?"
-- Calvin Dodge

The same minds that run statistics to reach the brilliant conclusion, "...it is possible that the number of deaths annually due to uninsurance could be as low as zero or as high as 47,000," are the same ones who manage institutions such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And yet the public wonders how we ended up with our current crisis.
-- Ira M. Kessel
Rochester, New York

COLBERT CAN'T SAY NO
Re: George H. Wittman's Mexican Badlands:

In the early '80s, there was a reaction against having TV make light of drug use and give at least indirect support and approval to drug use. There was even a failed variety show that had a skit on drugs, after which Buck Henry broke character and turned to the camera and gave, in the spirit of a reluctantly fulfilled duty, a little sermon on how bad drug use is, whatever the humor there may have been in the skit.

One very sad evidence of the shift away from this reluctantly more moral position has been the frequent joking and bantering by Jay Leno about his bandleader's supposed use of marijuana. But the most blatant offenders lately have been the two Comedy Central hits, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Both have had representatives of drug movies on for repartee and yucks. At least Stewart tried to include, without any real success, arguments that drug use is ultimately bad and wrong. Colbert doesn't even try.

Now Colbert is doing a Christmas special in which he is going to sing a drug-based parody of "Little Drummer Boy" with the well-known druggie Willie Nelson; it will be called "Little Dealer Boy." So Colbert will manage to be both drug-promoting and sacrilegious in the same song. Outrage is appropriate, and even more so, with the evidence of the drug-domination of Mexico provided by Wittman's column, not to mention the power of the drug trade among some ethnic groups and gangs inside the U.S.
-- Richard L.A. Schaefer
Dubuque, Iowa

WE'RE NUMBER 1!
Re: William Tucker's Dueling Narratives of
America:

William Tucker's "duel" can be reduced to one idea: those who still believe in American exceptionalism and those who don't. McCain does, Obama doesn't.

Perhaps it hasn't occurred to a lot of Americans, but the reason Obama relies so heavily on a Teleprompter may be due to the fact that he is incapable of speaking off-the-cuff about the unique greatness of this nation.
-- Arnold Ahlert
Boca Raton, Florida

MISALLOCATED
Re: George H. Wittman's Holding the Bag in Moscow:

Putin could use Russia's windfall oil revenues to rebuild Russia's military and intimidate Russia's neighbors, in an attempt to compensate for recent deep humiliations. Or Putin could invest the mountain of money in infrastructure, education, and such key technologies as biotechnology and nanotechnology, thereby ensuring a dynamic Russian economy into the highly competitive decades to come. Putin has chosen the former, much to Russia's future detriment.

Ronald Reagan taught Russians how to spend themselves into bankruptcy in the 1980s. Now they know how to collapse their own economy.
-- David Govett
Davis, California

CLEVER RUSE
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s The Democrats' Sham Energy Bill:

It's clear that these energy bills are a ruse to prevent the moratorium from lapsing. They are attempting to mislead the public into thinking that Congressional action is necessary to allow drilling...the truth is that no Congressional action is needed to allow the moratorium to lapse naturally and open up reserves.

This is our leadership? A viper's nest of liars, conmen, snake-oil salesmen and sunshine patriots. The question is how bad does it have to get before the American People wake up and put these clowns where they belong...in the unemployment line
-- major

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Education, Trade, Health Care, John McCain, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Business, Books, Movies, Law, Military, Russia, NATO, Energy, Oil