NONE DARE NOT CALL IT TREASON
Re: Paul Beston’s Acting Out:

Excellent, excellent article.
— Chris Gwin

Regarding Paul Beston’s column of the 23rd, Harry Reid is truly a pitiful excuse for a man, a senator, an American. But he is certainly not the only poor example of the United States ruling class. The Congress has a far better military than it deserves. God save us.
— J. C. Eaton
Chetek, Wisconsin

So, Harry Reid’s statement was “nearly treasonous.” At what point are we going to stop hedging about the Democrats’ treasonous, unpatriotic, and subversive words and actions? What ever happened to clear, straightforward language that is not prefaced by alleged, suspected, assumed, rumored, or thought? I realize that the Republicans’ have a two-pronged enemy: leftist Democrats (yes, I am questioning their patriotism) and their enablers i.e., the fifth column that is the present day media, but until they stand up to these people, the Democrats will be able to say anything they like with impunity.
— Seth Kanter
Goodyear, Arizona

Given his tendency to exaggerate, especially on the down side of important issues, I’ve always felt that Senator Harry Reid should have a nickname or “street” name as some might call it. How about Harry “The Sky is Falling” Reid?
— Stan Welli
Aurora, Illinois

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE??
Re: Richard Kirk’s Darwin, Brooks, and Mass Murder:

Richard Kirk seems to have missed the point of David Brooks’s article. Brooks is clearly not happy about the ascent of Darwinism, yet he recognizes that the preponderance of the evidence supports it and that it is replacing older cosmologies, religion, and even post-modernism as the dominant worldview.

Mr. Kirk also misrepresents sociobiology by suggesting that it offers no answer to why individuals might make heroic sacrifices when there is no apparent benefit to them. Books have been written on this topic, and there is no shortage of appealing and consistent explanations offered by evolutionary biologists.

Regarding good and evil, these are clearly human constructs that can easily be grouped with others such as the belief in a personal god who lives in heaven. David Brooks doesn’t like this turn of events either, but at least he’s trying to get with the program. I suggest that Mr. Kirk do the same.
— Abe Grossman
Pleasantville, New York

One of the great conundrums of Darwinism has always been the teleological dilemma. Evolutionists waste no opportunity to remind the unwashed masses that our existence on planet Earth is not the work of an outside agent possessing a superior intellect. Rather, they and their mentally superior friends insist that the incredible variation and complexity observed in our world can be explained simply by the random interaction of chemicals over vast expanses of time. Furthermore, they tell us, these chance encounters somehow organized themselves without the aid of a master plan or purpose of any kind. The only thing missing from their pronouncements is any proof as to how this might have occurred given that no one has produced an example of a random process capable of pulling off such a feat.

One thing has always puzzled me. If everything in this world arrived here without the need for intelligence, why would it be necessary to evolve it? Why do life forms that possess intelligence consider their species more highly evolved than those that do not? Surely, in the Darwinists’ metanarrative, blind chance working in tandem with eons of time has produced fantastic results and would have to be preferred over the use of unnecessary byproducts of evolutionary trial and error such as design, intelligence or purpose. So why have they survived as inheritable traits?
— Rick Arand
Lee’s Summit, Missouri

BROADCASTING’S BROADSIDES
Re: Happy Feder’s NBC Loses It:

Sunday afternoon, while visiting the Virginia Tech campus, about 50 miles east of here, I chatted with several people. To three young people and the father of VPI students with whom I spoke, more than just NBC “lost it.”

One young Blacksburg resident, who knew slain Jarrett Lane, of Narrows, Va., about 20 miles east of here, roundly criticized NBC for airing the Cho video. He said he’d heard that the families of slain students were refusing to speak with the news media, mainly because of that. That’s hearsay, I know, but the young fellow made a sound point: Murderer Cho certainly got more than his 15 minutes of fame, over and over and over again. But was much said or has much been said, really, by NBC about the murdered students or faculty?

NBC’s excess on Cho but shortage on the victims genuinely troubled this young man. Me, too, for what it’s worth—that and the Big Three choosing not to interrupt their escapist Monday night programming to report something genuinely newsworthy, here and globally.

Besides this fellow saying how negatively he and the townies perceived the media had behaved, a man from New Market, Va., who has children and a son-in-law at Tech, pulled no punch. He said the news media have acted like “horses’ asses.”

One of the man’s children, a Virginia Tech graduate who works for the university, told of how offensively intrusive the national TV media has been. Her husband, a Tech senior, added that the news media, particularly national, has been “pesky.” With a smile, he and she noted the broadcast media’s satellite trucks were banned from campus.

There are some real grab-your-heart, open-your-eyes, human-interest stories in Blacksburg and at Tech that go beyond Cho. These need reporting. They’re not the follow-the-reporters’-gaggle type. Sadly, with very few exceptions, the national news media seems not to notice or have the ability to report them. Should they notice, their distance the young Blacksburg fellow also mentioned won’t work. They’ll need to show some heart, which they can do and still get the stories.

Maybe the media doesn’t know how to show heart, though. For example, the young lady offered that during Friday’s memorial service, she could see only one member of the media, a cameraman, who even had Tech’s colors on. That justifiably upset her. Was it too much for all the media representatives there to be Hokies for just a day?
— C. Kenna Amos
Princeton, West Virginia

Dennis Miller, comedian, pundit, and now host of a daily CNBC radio talk show, was being given the “treatment” last week by Bill O’Reilly on the latter’s Fox cable TV show. In the aftermath of law’s success in rendering Virginia Tech students defenseless, but its failure in protecting the same students from mortal peril, O’Reilly invited Miller to help O’Reilly lob some grenades into Rosie O’Donnell’s lap, ostensibly because of O’Donnell’s public hypocrisy of retaining armed security personnel while simultaneously denying ordinary people the same power to defend themselves, and O’Donnell’s anti-gun declarations after Columbine and Virginia Tech.

Miller declined, stating, “I think everybody is entitled to a forty-eight hour pass [after a horrific incident].” This sounded cool and collected, certainly nonjudgmental, the First Commandment of politically correct America. Maybe Miller had a point. Maybe not.

I recalled a comment the late American historian Shelby Foote had made of Ulysses Grant. Grant had what was called “four o’clock in the morning courage.” Grant could be woken from a sound sleep at four o’clock in the morning, advised that Lee had attacked with Longstreet, Hill and Gordon, yet Grant could immediately and clearly think and make his orders correctly. Grant did not need a forty-eight hour pass.

O’Donnell is not being called from her sleep at four AM to lead troops in the field. She is not being called upon to entertain the troops in the field. When Frances Langford warbled to tens of thousands of GIs “I’m in the mood for love,” one in the audience shouted, “You’ve come to the right place.” That is not a consideration in this context. But O’Donnell has been appointed by millions of American women to be a daytime leader for millions of American women. They hang on her words. They get their sense of what is right and what is wrong from her. They quote her. Her word is gospel.

But she doesn’t have four o’clock in the morning courage. She doesn’t have four o’clock in the afternoon courage. Neither do Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi. In all these cases, the American people, from various sexual, racial and geographic groups, have chosen them as their leaders, and depend on them for leadership. To his credit, Dennis Miller noted in the matter of Sharpton and Jackson that the choice of them to be leaders was the paramount concern.

How can the American people be made aware that they have chosen leaders without “four o’clock in the morning courage”? Certainly not by giving those leaders a forty-eight hour pass. Americans need to comprehend that the failures of their leaders represent a failure of the Americans who chose those leaders. Only with a generous realization of mea maxima culpa can America dismiss its failures and set about choosing the men and women who merit positions of leadership.
— Frank Natoli
Newton, New Jersey

At the end of a week when Imus’s self-destruction due to the “hurt feelings” of the Rutgers Womens’ Basketball team still hung in the air. At the end of a week when there was a display of mindless hate and violence on the campus of Virginia Tech. At the end of a week when, as is the case almost every week, Islamofascists murdered a hundred, or so, men, women and children. The “humor” show, Saturday Night Live, after trashing the President, Wolfowitz and Attorney General Gonzales, on their “Weekend Update,” presented this display of mindless hate and violence which savaged the Vice President of the United States, and our security forces, while presenting the murdering jihadist as sympathetic, guilt free, “tortured” waifs.

See this link for TV Funhouse, Torboto.

It won’t cost the NBC suits, Lorne Michaels or the writer/creator, Robert Smigel a thing. Nobody will be fired and nobody will be called to account by outraged wags, politicians and elites. More and more I feel we’re on a ship of fools and, contrary to the Global Warming doyen, Al Gore, a very “not melting” iceberg is straight ahead and the media/Democrat fusion campaign will steer our ship of state into it in ’08; if not sooner.

Bernie Goldberg has it right in the title of his new book, “Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right.”

God help our Republic….everybody else seems to be dedicated to there own selfish agendas and the Country and the war on terror be damned.
— Bill McGroarty
New York, New York

ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO DETROIT
Re: G. Tracy Mehan, III’s Another Earth Day Has Passed:

Since Tracy Mehan knows a thing or two about water quality, I do wish he would share his wisdom with us. He writes :

“The Detroit River lost this valuable fishery due to a witch’s brew of oil, phosphorus, mercury and organochlorine pollution over many years. Relative to 1972 levels, oil and phosphorus pollution levels are down 98 percent and 95 percent respectively. Mercury contamination in fish tissue is down 70 percent, and PCB contamination is down 83 percent as measured in herring gulls from a nearby island.”

Since he is possessed of all those percentages, he must have a line on the data that , being multiplied and divided, yielded them. So how much mercury graced each gram of whole fish and phosphorous each liter of water back on Earth Day Minus One?
— Russell Seitz
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Thank you for the nicest article on Detroit in years. The Detroit River is surprisingly clean and the fishing, in Lake St. Clair, is superb. It is unfortunate one can’t say the same thing about the city of Detroit but really, what can one expect after 40 years of Democrats ruining, I mean running, the town?

Please inform Mr. Poulos that after a 5-year disappearance from Grosse Pointe Farms that the bees have returned in hordes. In fact there are so many of them, I’m trying to figure out the kindest way to kill them (fear not, only the ones fighting over building a hive in our swing set).

Now if the swallows would return to Capistrano, then as P.G. Wodehouse would say, “The lark ‘s on the wing; The snail’s on the thorn; God ‘s in His heaven — All’s right with the world!

Plus Algore would have to find a new cause celeb.

Warmest Regards,
— Mrs. Jackson
Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan

TEACHING THE BIRDS & THE BEES
Re: James G. Poulos’s None of Our Beesness:

“…the California almond crop could plummet from 2,400 pounds per acre to 40, a fall of 600%.”

The numbers quoted are a 98% drop in production.

Complete loss of the almond crop would be a reduction of 100%. How can production fall more than 100%?
— Stephan Polansky

James Poulos writes: “Though speaking from the sidelines, from the unrelated field of theoretical physics, Albert Einstein once suggested that in a world without bees ‘man would have only four years of life left.'”

Einstein never said that.
— Brian Riley

EATING OUR YOUNG
Re: Jay D. Homnick’s Partial Rebirth of a Nation:

It is refreshing to see folks who stand up for what is obvious to anyone with a conscience. While politicians might conclude that Jay’s language in this piece is rather crude, I applaud him for stating what this procedure actually does. Religious people in this country are always lampooned as being primitive and believing in fairy tales. But when you look at the people that condone this procedure in spite of all the research that says it’s unnecessary, who is it that’s clinging to primitive traditions like child sacrifice to the god of convenience?
— Pablo J. Canales
Miami, Florida

THE ERA OF GOOD FEELINGS
Re: Thomas Donley’s letter (under “Apocalyptic Decline”) in Reader Mail’s Mall Rats et al.:

Thomas Donley’s letter compares the downward spiral of morals, courage and self sacrifice in the face of certain death in the hope of saving others to his own upbringing by his WWII veteran dad. Mr. Donley’s remarks required a bit of courage and will no doubt result in a deluge of criticism. Let me just say — before Mr. Donley is set upon — I applaud this assessment, but gone are the days of “doing the right thing” at the right time.

We live in the era where the “right thing” is erecting instant shrines of teddy bears, school mascots, and lighting sidewalks full of candles and lots of after-the-fact hugging for the TV cameras. I even saw an artful red outline of a body on a sidewalk — presumed to be a blood stain, but a bit perfect in detail. Someone had smacked several band-aids on it. No doubt meant out of respect and mourning but reminded me of Bill Clinton’s straightening crosses at Normandy.

Just a couple of students with the “Let’s Roll” Todd Beamer attitude of the several men on Flight 93 might have made the difference. Of course, it every able bodied man on Flight 93 had joined the few, that might have made a difference, too. Many argued against it.

We are not a stiff upper lip society and more’s the pity. Instead of respectful mourning, we must bear the mawkish, maudlin “human interest” stories interrupting our prayers for the departed — not to mention an endless slow crawl of pictures of the victims, listing their major and the posthumous degrees — How about posthumously retiring student loans? Now that would be a gesture!– more than you will ever see of similar age service personnel who lose their lives on a daily basis far off in a strange land where no candles are lit. Their boots and helmet at a simple service will remind their comrades they have fallen fighting for the freedom of others to go to college.

I have a grandson who is a sophomore in college. His first week as freshman, wearing his LIFEGUARD shirt from high school, he was offered a job on the campus fire department — spent his freshman year in training. He is now a full fledged firefighter as well as an A student. He is smart, strong and quick-thinking. I have thought this past week what he would do in such a situation. I think he would make Mr. Donley proud. Marty’s Emergency Medical Training would have perhaps saved some lives. How sad that these students some with double majors had no survival skills

I have a five year old grandson who will start kindergarten in August. If I take him on his first day and see a NO BULLY ZONE sign in the classroom, I swear I will home school him. Not that I fear he will be bullied. I just may have to anyway — he reads at third grade level. Granma taught him. Not that I am in favor of bullies. I am just opposed to teachers wasting class time conducting a course in “bullying is bad.” I kind like the notion of children teaching other children not to bully.

I was taken aback by the “Diane Smith Returns” — You may recall my husband Hal, he of the dissecting aorta. Well, Hal is back, too. Back to swimming and back to mowing his own lawn, which is probably a relief to our middle 13 year old grandson who has done mowing with his dad (our son) since December when Poppy was felled. Hal’s being an 83 year old WWII veteran may have been a factor! We are elated. Doctors are astonished.
— Diane Smith
South San Francisco, California