ENEMY OF THE CENTURY
Re: Enemy Central’s The Air Up There:

It is always hard to disagree with the final decision determining the EOW because all of the nominees actually deserve the award, or rather merit the dishonor, and certainly our wonderful U.S. Supreme Court one could argue long ago earned a career Enemy of the Century in two centuries. However, the behavior of millionairess Nancy Pelosi, the world traveler and tourist, would seem more deserving of the award this week. The total concept of this woefully misguided attempt to undermine the elected and constitutional executive branch of our government is certainly bad enough, but her lying about a message from the Israeli government to the butchers in Syria should gag any American. Further it should end Jewish Americans’ electoral commitment to a Democratic Party that abuses them at every step but alas it probably will not. It took over a hundred years for the South to break their ties to the Democrats.
— Jack Wheatley
Royal Oak, Michigan

The recent Supreme Court ruling on global warming is just one more example of why elections are important. One wonders if Ronald Regan had had a Republican Senate would he have made the abysmal appointment of Justice Kennedy? George W. Bush knowing he had a solid Republican Senate was able to appoint two stellar justices. Roberts and Alito working with Reagan’s Scalia and Bush 41’s Thomas have brought balance and sense to what could easily be a bigger joke than the courts of Eurabia. In 2008 conservatives need to think beyond punishing Republicans and think about the future or plan to see Justice Stevens replaced with someone that makes Kennedy look reasonable.
— Michael Tomlinson
Jacksonville, North Carolina

Well folks, I was truly a skeptic when it comes to the reality of global warming. But, alas, the more I read the news, the more I am convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that indeed the earth is warming. And folks, as much as I hate to break the news to you, it is indeed because of humans. You see folks, it’s like this! Every time the doomer, gloomer, anti-capitalist nut bag alarmist leftists open their collective mouths, nothing but hot air comes out. And lately, there has been so much hot air coming out of the left that the earth has got to be warming.

It would be interesting if we could only get a government grant to spend money on a good heat transfer analysis model just to see how much hot air it takes to raise the temperature of this planet by one degree as a result of all that nut bag leftist hot air being spewed into the atmosphere. I’ll bet the results would frighten any brainwashed little kid confined to the failing public school system!
— Jim L
East Sandwich, Massachusetts

WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Re: G. Tracy Mehan, III’s Missing the Rational Center:

How can anybody write an article about the dangers of big ideas without mentioning the successes of Ronald Reagan? For crying out loud, Ronald Reagan was the classic politician with a big idea — he was going to win the Cold War and the Russians were going to lose. Ideas don’t come any bigger than that — he said it and he did it. What’s more, I can well remember the derision Ronald Reagan received from both the foreign policy and economic policy aristocracy — the “experts” we are supposed to trust now. They have forgotten how much crow they choked on during the Reagan presidency. According to them, Reagan was a simpleton and an amiable fool. Remember George H W Bush talking about “voodoo economics” during the 2000 primaries? I would like to see him repeat that now. In foreign policy, Reagan ignored the defeatism of “experts” like Henry Kissinger to live with the Soviet Union and he bought it to its knees instead. Compared to Reagan winning the equivalent of the World Series all by himself, Kissinger is a cheap bum and a sore loser who never hit a home run in his life. Reagan was dead right to keep him off his team.

Ronald Reagan is the most successful President since World War 2 precisely because he had enough confidence in himself to make his own agenda and ignore the fashionable groupthink of establishment opinion. That is what great men do, they are leaders and not followers – anybody can parrot the party line but it takes much more than that to lead and inspire people to achieve things that nobody else thinks possible. Ronald Reagan believed that America was a great nation because it had big ideas and principles and the courage to make them happen. When Americans base their actions on this, as they did in World War 2, they win. When they rely on cheap, cynical opportunism, appeasement and compromise, which is invariably what establishment politics are about, rather than conviction, principles and commitment, they fail every time. George W. Bush is an establishment politician with few ideas or convictions worth mentioning and he has repeatedly failed because of that. All the experts in Christendom won’t help him, he is an empty shell. That is the real lesson of the Reagan revolution and it is the lesson that far too many people have forgotten, to their great cost. It is a big worry to see that many conservatives appear to have forgotten this lesson as well and I see that as a very bad indicator of moral failure and weakness that does not bode well for the future.
— Christopher H
Canberra, Australia

Mr. Mehan has a vision of the world filled with intelligent people in positions of power and influence who can keep order in the world through fiat. Application of force to resolve conflict could be shifted away from military means to punitive actions against wayward actors conceived by the intelligentsia. Nirvana would be achieved when no soldier ever died in combat again, and human events would follow in the manner of his dream.

Since WWII and through the Cold War to the present, The U.S. has been the primary military power in the world. Our foreign policy has been to keep a level of order in the world necessary to achieve peaceful coexistence among peoples engaged in competitive enterprises. To this end The U.S. has contributed a pledge to protect other peoples with a nuclear umbrella, the force of its military, application of its treasure, promoting its currency to a premium over other currencies, and rejection of unfair advantage over the disadvantaged.

The time has come again as happened with Viet Nam when too much is being asked of America and simultaneously America has offered more than it can deliver.

The remedy is twofold, a change in foreign policy and energy legislation. The U.S. should withdraw part of its forces immediately from Germany, Japan, South Korea and proportionally the rest of the world to recharge its own military. Withdrawals could be offset by contributions of equal forces to our effort in the Middle East. At the same time The U.S. must begin drilling for cheap oil, building nuclear power plants, and develop through research coal and hydrogen technologies.

These goals are realistic and achievable and will refocus the rest of the world, particularly Europe and Japan, on their own needs for energy security and the need for them to help pay for it.
— Howard Lohmuller

Mehan III, Clarke and Webb are missing the rational center. Or are just afraid of a fight. We needed to do what we have done. Maybe not in the way we did it. We should have been more forceful and used more troops to secure areas. We should not have been such a baby in dealing with troublemakers as well. But the war was always justified and winnable as was Vietnam until babies like yourselves (politicians) got involved and had us lose it.
— Joseph D’Ambrosia

IT WON’T BE PRETTY
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s The Hippies’ Last Hurrah

The really big difference between the real 1960s and the redux is that back then this gang of thugs were only the toddlers kicking and screaming in the street until Mommy and Daddy got out of the war, and they didn’t have to see the results of that surrender and flight until many years later.

Today they ARE Mommy and Daddy — they are the ones who will be sending millions of men, women and children to their deaths by their votes or by their actions — and everyone will see the dead bodies and the mass graves 24/7 right in their living rooms…while the people who are responsible for it are still in command, and with their own words broadcast telling us that the butchery, carnage and destruction we are seeing “Ain’t Gonna Happen.”

Personally, if the conservatives can’t get off Stupid long enough to stop it before it starts, watching Jane and John and Bill and Hill try to weasel their way out of taking the fall for this one would be worth the price.
— Kate Shaw
In the Bleachers Watching

As a former peace-marcher, draft-dodger and general-purpose sixties clown, I cringe when I behold a bunch of gray beards, halfwits and homely women struggling under the weight of picket signs that have been in storage since 1969. How can they refuse to learn from, or even acknowledge, the grim business that followed the end of America’s presence in Southeast Asia? Half a million people were sent to concentration camps in Vietnam. In Cambodia, a million were slaughtered at the behest of a psychopath, educated in France, who committed genocide to prove that Rousseau was right, that people are basically good.

How, late at night, with the TV off and the lantern flickering, can these people pretend that what they said and did in the ’60s should be a source of pride? How, with that maniac little fellow from Iran striking deals with his counterparts in Korea and Venezuela, can they pretend we are not in danger? My guess is that, after 40 years of dither and look the other way, it is impossible for them to acknowledge that the values of their counterculture were no more than night moves and funny lights. To do that is to acknowledge that Richard Nixon had it right, and that peace-marchers, draft-dodgers and general-purpose sixties clowns were no more than a rabble, exploited by knaves and fools at home and abroad. And they are doing it again.

But knowing that to be the case does not make it any easier to admire George Bush and his penny-loafer immigration policy.
— Edmund Dantes
Coshocton, Ohio

COULDN’T BE HELPED
Re: Ralph R. Reiland’s No Blues, No Boos:

Ralph Reiland made some fabulous points in his observation of competitiveness being another “issue” that the PC crowd wants to eliminate in our society, right up until he brought George W. Bush into it while omitting the Clintons. Couldn’t resist throwing that barb, eh Professor?
— John Nelson
Hebron, Connecticut

HOSTAGE ENRICHMENT REDUX
Re: Re: Robert Nowall’s letter (under “Captive Nations”) in Reader Mail’s Staying the Course:

No more than a hour after I sent in my last e-mail on this subject, word came down that the British soldiers were to be released; now, I gather, they’re back in Britain. Much as I’m grateful they’re safe, it’s just that, as I see it, in a few months or so, we’ll be back in the same kind of situation, arguing the same arguments, and being worried about the same worries.
— Robert Nowall
Cape Coral, Florida