MAJOR BUSH LEAGUE
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s Searching for Jacques Shirk:

When you spoke of Jessie Jackson’s (a.k.a. Jester Jackass) children’s rhymes you overlooked his classic “Stay out da Bushes!”

I was sorry to see such a choice piece of idiocy overlooked!
— Robert Einarsson

CLASS DISMISSED
Re: The Washington Prowler’s State of the Union Strikers:

RUDE, RUDE, RUDE, The Dems have NO CLASS, dissing the President in that manner displays their lack of maturity. And approved by leader Pelosi? Child’s play.
— Dee Ohanian
Bloomfield, MI

Isn’t “Liberal House Democrat” redundant? Like “The Department of
Redundancy Department”?

I want to know who they were, who they represent, that almost 5% of the House members and nearly 10% of the Democrats in the house were so rude, so crude that they would walk away from a President addressing the nation during a time of war, or near war and when we really do need to attempt to do something for the economy.

I find it just unbelievable. GWB is a kind and decent man who would never consider something like that. He has time and again been civil in the face of in-civility, diplomatic in the face of rude disagreement, and I want people to know just what the far left looks like. I am stunned that 20 congressman would walk out.
— Roger Ross
Tomahawk WI

I’d like to know the names of the 20 House members who walked out on the President’s speech. Thanks.
— Jennifer Lashley

THE RISKS OF DOING BUSINESS
Re: The Washington Prowler’s A Head Start:

“A Connecticut entrepreneur is selling white leather yarmulkes with a red, white and blue logo that, with clever positioning, reads ‘Lieberman 4 President 2004.”

That’s fine, but does he give a money back guarantee or a correctly worded replacement for when Gore decides to run and publicly holds Lieberman to his noncompete vow?
— unsigned

ENEMY CORN
Re: Enemy Central’s When All Is Sarandon (Again):

The American Prowler is indeed one of my very favorite pages. You always have a perspective that is a delightful surprise. I saw something on TV that might be of interest to the Enemy of the Week that has another of Hollywood’s so-called professional pretenders / experts on foreign affairs actually practicing what he preaches.

The movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? has a scene with George Clooneybird sitting around eating an ear of corn while talking to his so-called friends. His one friend breaks off a nice-sized dead tree limb and smacks his partner across the head while Mr. Clooneybird looks on. With very little reaction to his friend getting his melon belted out of the park by Babe Ruth, The Clooneybird simply shrugs it off and goes back to eating his corn while Mr. Ruth simply walks over and whacks him into the bleachers with his friend. There is an interesting correlation with this scene an his brilliant standard of foreign policy that Enemy Central could do wonders with — although I seriously doubt that anyone could make a bigger fool out of Mr. Clooney than Mr. Clooney himself every time he opens his mouth.

Where in the world do these people come from and what has happened to their loyalty to their fellow man and Country? It’s down right shameful.
— Dale Janssen
Libby, MT

JUST SAY SO
Re: Lawrence Henry’s You’re Wrong, Mr. Raspberry:

William Raspberry’s arguments reveal who the true “racists ” are. I wish that George Bush would as clearly articulate the tactics of excluding any opposition as being anti-black so we might have an issue-oriented dialogue for a change. But, isn’t that the way the left argues every position it takes? If you oppose abortion on demand, are you not anti-women’s rights and anti-fem? And a man isn’t allowed to enter the debate at all because he is non-child-bearing and therefore has no standing to have any say at all. Bravo to The Prowler for the principled opposition.
— Richard Johnson
Sterling, VA

TOUGH ROOM
Re: George Neumayr’s Thacker Wacked:

Mr. Neumayr informs us that Jerry Thacker comment “gay plague” was an exhumed comment. Exhumed from where? The only attribution ever offered that Mr. Thacker said this is derived from liberal journals such as the N.Y. Times. Does Mr. Neumayr offer proof that Mr. Thacker has ever said this?

No, he doesn’t; therefore, he serves well as another uninformed lickspittle helping the liberal media spread their filth.

Mr. Thacker did indeed say “death style,” but certainly not in the context implied by Mr. Neumayr. This guy is a conservative voice? Not by half.
— Stephen J. Guthrie

TALKBACK LIVE
Re: J. Donnelly’s “Papal Portrait” letter in Reader Mail’s Religious Differences:

It is intellectually dishonest, in my opinion, to provide a list of out-of-context quotes as proof of your proposition, no matter how prestigious the names on that list. You infer that anyone who concludes that Pope Pius XII could have done more to help the Jews during the Holocaust is an anti-Catholic leftist. Labeling those whose opinions differ from your own is, I believe, taking the easy way out. I prefer to limit my own inquiry to a careful review of historical works. There are those who conclude, as you do, that the Church and the Pope did all they could have reasonably have been expected to do to save Jews. I disagree with their conclusions, as do many historians, theologians, philosophers, etc. The works of these scholars are readily available in any Public Library or popular bookstore. I would suggest you take the time to read a few (even those that may disagree with your own conclusions).

Yes, there were many Christians, among them many Catholics, including members of the clergy, who did act or speak out, even at great risk to themselves. Some of them paid for this courage with their lives. We are still left with the following question: Did the Church, as an institution, do all that it could? I, and many others, conclude, sorrowfully, that it did not.

Some of us, believe it or not, are not members of the Anti-Roman Catholic Left! I respect your right to disagree with me. I take issue, however, with the fact that you, like Mr. Bowman in his review of Amen (Der Stellvertreter), reduce those who differ with you to a stereotype.
Respectfully,
— Jay Shuman
Elizabeth, NJ

I’m glad J. Donnelly had more to respond with to Jay Shuman’s claim that “[n]o serious historical scholar can argue with the fact that the Catholic Church has a well-documented history of anti-Semitism, going back to its very beginnings” than I might have had.

The best I was able to come up with — which is why I didn’t write immediately — is to point out that the first “pope” was St. Peter. And he was no less Jewish than Jesus himself.
— Kevin McGehee
Coweta County, GA

CHOICE REMARKS
Re: Geoff Brandt’s “Uneasy Independence” letter in Reader Mail’s Religious Differences:

I’d like to thank Geoff Brandt/Deist for his splendid rehashing of tired old rhetoric:

“But I’m an Independent who feels just a tad more like a “Small-L” Libertarian, one who takes great exception to Ashcroft’s visit to Oregon about its anti-suicide law, the Anti-Choice rhetoric and the GOP’s Morality Police.

“No, I certainly am not pro-abortion, but I resent anyone — especially those obnoxious and venomous loudmouths who would try to tell my daughters what they can or cannot do with their bodies.”

I can’t seem to get through the day if I don’t get my dose of the lowest common denominator of silly one-liners being presented as enlightened thinking.

Let’s tackle the “Anti-Choice rhetoric” he hates so much and proclaims is the whole-owned subsidiary of the GOP.

Does he mean the GOP that wants choice in public education to create an environment of competition and accomplishment to benefit the students? Does he mean the GOP that wants employees to have a choice in the 12.4% of their hard earned money taken by force from them and their employers for Social Security? Does he mean the GOP that want to the choice not to have their children indoctrinated with pseudo-science and forced acceptance of homosexuality? Or maybe it’s the evil GOP that are trying so take away our choice to drive an SUV because they erroneously think their elimination alone will totally wipe out our use of foreign oil?

And Mr. Brandt earns my “Look at me ma, I’m smart” award for his predictable and tired argument about “what women can or cannot do with their bodies.” I’m now happy to know Mr. Brandt is against laws banning prostitution, heroin and other drug usage, public nudity, bestiality, etc.

Gotta love those “small-L” Libertarians who should change the name of their party to “Pot and Hookers for All”!
— Greg Barnard
Franklin, TN

BLACKBOARD JUNGLES
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s Moody Blues:

In reference to the above column, I found it hard to decide whether it’s tongue-in-cheek or not, when you say, “I see a need for these medications,” as a way, I suppose, for anesthetizing not only our children but the rest of us from the chaos and insanities of modern day America. What makes me think you mean it is that at one point you say about the doctors that prescribe “ritalin for attention deficit disorder” and other “anti-depressants with growing frequency” to our nation’s school children that they are “not only fine doctors. They are humanitarians.”

From someone whose columns I ordinarily highly admire, these remarks jarred me. By explanation, let me say that I grew up and went to school from first grade through college during public education’s golden age which in the fifties got slowly, then quite rapidly in the sixties and seventies, snuffed out of existence. As a returning veteran who had spent two and a half years in the service of which 18 months was in the very thick of the fighting and had then, in fond memory of my own school days, decided to devote myself to that cause, and became a public school teacher in 1952, just about the time the book Blackboard Jungle became a best seller. Whatever qualifications I may have had for the job, timing my entrance into it wasn’t one of them. Not too soon after, as another symptom of the maladies previously unknown but now afflicting the entire enterprise of education, there suddenly too arose another best seller to meteoric fame called Why Johnny Can’t Read. The author’s Rx derived from the misapprehension that the school system had suddenly been overcome by amnesia and was no longer using phonics but had in fact taken a fancy to a “new method” for teaching reading called the look-say approach. It was this change that the author, Rudolph Flesch, fingered as the culprit-answer to the question his book title posed. As someone who as a student and then as a father-teacher experienced in spades the transition from educational heaven to educational hell, [I knew that] the true source of the change lay in the content of the book Blackboard Jungle….

Rudolph Flesch’s best seller was not only misguided, it never even tried to explain why illiteracy had never even been considered a serious problem in the first 50 years of the 20th century….

In all the years in which I sat at the foot of competent and qualified teachers who knew their subjects, I never ran into any such beast as Attention Deficit Disorder. What is described now in awesome medical terminology is nothing less than a scam for preventing the current system being held accountable for victimizing what ordinary healthy children do who stop paying attention when they sense that what they are getting is a forced feeding in non-learning. Can you blame them for becoming nettlesome when, instead of getting lessons in reading, arithmetic, history, geography and citizenship, they get lessons in problem solving, conflict resolution, self-esteem development, and how to research subjects about which they have not a clue to begin with.

If you were talking tongue-in-cheek, I wish you would say so in clear unequivocal language. Otherwise, you seem to be willing to go along with the status quo.
— Julius Gordon
Douglaston, NY