The American Spectator

Reader Mail

YOU'RE IN, PHIL
Re: Philip Klein's You're Out, Tom:

Hi there good people --

I love -- make that LOVE -- The American Spectator and the opinions you publish. I read most but rarely follow the visitor comment threads that follow. Today, I ran through all the comments attached to the "You're Out, Tom" piece by Philip Klein. Actually, I was looking to see if anyone else picked up on the delicious, but unstated, look back to the role of Michael Corleone in the original Godfather. The juxtaposition in concept with Mr. Obama is wonderful.
-- Mark Merritt
Fiddletown, California

Editor's note: Alan Brooks got it, at 5:55 p.m. yesterday: "'You're out, Tom.' Mikey to Tom Hagen, right?"

I dearly hope someone in the Republican Party is collecting the plethora of precious lines pouring out from Democrats making excuses for their paragons of tax-evading purity.

Pah!

If, that is, they can keep from choking and gagging every time they read them.
-- A. C. Santore

IT PAYS TO HAVE A FRIEND NAMED OBAMA
Re: George Neumayr's Class Carfare:

Thank you Mr. Neumayr for pointing out that the Emperor has yet to get dressed, and that his court is also sporting clothes from the same haberdashery!

However, the spin that the MSM is putting on all of this is that they failed to pay some taxes, when in reality the miscreants have failed to report income. Had you or I failed to report a paltry quarter million in income, we would surely be in tax court facing penalties that include incarceration. Mr. Obama took pains to explain yesterday that he did not want to even hint that there are 2 sets of rules, you know, the pesky old double standard. Except that there ARE 2 sets of rules, and Mr. Geithner proved it last week.
-- Greg Mercurio
Vacaville, California

Watching the unfolding debacle between the Great One's minions and a stumbling, tripping, drunken Congress, I see the great ocean liner has hit the iceberg. Folks are still in the control room assuring passengers the jolt they felt was a small bump in the night, while sharks from Al Qaeda start gathering around the vessel. Tax issues? I am more concerned with a statement yesterday from the Great One's staff, after a shaken Gen. Petraeus left the White House. The statement read, and I quote:

"In their report, the Chiefs concluded that the existing American goals in Afghanistan, established by the Bush administration, are overly broad and ambitious. The report does not call for abandoning U.S. hopes of turning Afghanistan into a moderate Western-style democracy, or for halting counter-narcotics efforts, but it does suggest making those steps part of a long-term vision, rather than a goal."

I see talk show hosts fixed on jabbering wildly about the cheating crooks in Congress, when what should be spoken aloud is the military's abandonment. With a son on his 9th tour (yes, ninth), I am on my knees imploring my Heavenly Father to just bring him home safely to his family, his wife and lovely little girl, "Liberty." Our men and women fight for precious liberty and freedom, not for a vague "vision."

Someone needs to focus on the fact (both on radio and in your management) about where all this is heading when we suffer a catastrophic loss, militarily speaking. Yesterday it was also announced that if any generals reproached the Great Ones desire to leave Iraq in under 16 months, they could pack their bags and find a job elsewhere. No one talks about these things but we military families are watching unfold the final assurance, which some of us knew, that Obama is worse than a Chicago politician. He plans to dismantle the United States as we know it.
-- Beverly Gunn
Texas

TAKE IT TO THE BANK
Re: Lawrence A. Hunter's Killing the Big, Bad Banks:

While the article makes sense, its details leave us in the same mess where we are -- i.e. more government management of economic assets in order to insulate us from poor and criminal management by both private and public officials. If we proceed along this path we owe Mussolini a huge apology and Eisenhower a huge slap in the face concerning the dangers of the military-industrial complex.

What expertise does the government have in banking? If it has so much talent that it can cure the banking insolvencies, then all banks should be nationalized today.

The solution to the banking crisis is not to play shell games with corrosive assets but to let the orderly and perhaps not so orderly liquidation of them occur in the private market with as much alacrity as possible. The government's role would be to provide incentives and support for those who need to deliver food and shelter to those on the losing end.

Such an approach would introduce a great deal of instability to the banking system for the rest of the year but it would recover its balance. The large incompetent money center banks would dissolve into vapors with second tier banks to step into the void. If the government wants a role it can begin investigations into root cause analysis of the crisis but with a Senate which confirmed a tax cheating liar like Timothy Geithner I suspect that more cellars than roots would be found.

Government and bankster led solutions are the same as letting the fox guard the hen house. Ultimately resolution trust type solutions are akin to bloodletting in an age of modern medicine. There are too many differences between now and the late 1980s to cover here but I assert that the efforts to bail out the savings and loan institutions removed the moral hazard needed to avert our present crisis.

The discipline of moral hazard is very powerful. Bankers did not become irresponsible for 65 years until a new generation with no conception of the banking holiday of 1933 took over. Until the new generation of bankers is taught the indelible lesson that the mismanagement of banks -- even if mandated by government -- is fraught with dangers and devastation, then we ensure a quick repeat. All of this talk of saving the banks and banksters from themselves is the talk of a corrupt, gasping, collapsing regime.

I look forward to articles addressing causation of the banking insolvencies as most mainstream analysis has completely ignored the issue of capital destruction.
-- David Bonn

AXIS OF EVIL, TV EDITION
Re: Jeffrey Lord's The Limbaugh-Hannity Administration:

When I was twelve, one of my chores was to watch the evening news on television and note down the stock market report for my dad. We lived in the Midwest and there was no way to get the report back then except to wait for the morning newspaper if you did not get the report from the television news. Old Uncle Walter one evening during the Tet Offensive showed the execution of a war criminal who was the commander of an attack on school children in Saigon. But Walter did not say that this was a war criminal and that the Geneva Convention calls for summary execution of the illegal combatant on the field of battle. I would not learn that until I was seventeen. I had never seen anyone executed before then and to see that without context was certainly more shocking than when I first saw people having sex.

Walter and the other liberals did not openly call for the execution of the three and half million Indo-Chinese who were killed but were certainly aware that they would be killed. It had been discussed by Howard K Smith on ABC in his commentaries. There should be some way to fine CBS for allowing the network to become party to one of the three greatest crimes of the twentieth century. Maybe a fine of $1000 per person killed. CBS was after all a government-licensed broadcasting agent with government troops at the ready to put down any pirate broadcaster who dared to speak up with a dissenting view.
-- Gregory Franke