Femme Natale - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Femme Natale
by

GENERATION X’ED
Re: George Neumayr’s Nancy Pelosi’s Modest Proposal:

Standing at the pointed end of the Democratic Party is one of their least capable leaders, Madame Speaker Pelosi. How anyone so incredibly stupid and ineloquent could rise to such a position of prominence is beyond all rationalization. Can they do no better than this? If anyone had any questions about her moral character to say nothing of her intellectual capacity, yesterday should have erased all doubts. She is an embarrassment to her party and this country.
Greg Mercurio
Vacaville, California

Ms. Pelosi is no Jonathon Swift. To see her make her point, stuttering and stammering, avoiding eye contact, was just like watching the great comedians Flip Wilson or Jonathon Winters. Both a bit crazy and hilarious.

Ms. Pelosi is clearly in the middle stages of dementia, which makes her the perfect liberal. She gleefully illustrates that she has no clue what either she or her party and doing and is proud of it. Or perhaps her darker side is being revealed. Many of us are old enough to remember another leader from Europe who began by eliminating “mental defectives” and moved on to a much broader range of “eliminees.” Presumably Ms. Pelosi will not permit her children and their numerous offspring to be a part of her social engineering as they would contain her DNA and thus be too valuable to the future of America.

Ms. Pelosi illustrates a terrible truth about our elected officials: if you can keep getting elected long enough the absolutely least competent can become leaders. She is exceeded in her lack of leadership only by one person, the Senate’s grey little man, Harry Reid. America has reached the zenith of hiring the handicapped.
Jay Molyneaux
North Carolina

From ABC News “This Week” Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, was asked about spending in the stimulus package that included hundreds of millions to expand family planning (abortion) services.

“The family planning services reduce cost,” Pelosi said. “One of the elements of this package is assistance to the states. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those — one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.”

Translation: All their “services” for children are a burden to the states, but rather than cut or reorganize these services they plan to reduce the demand… the number of children that some day might need services, by aborting the unwanted children. Thus, children are a commodity… both political assets to be utilized and financial liabilities to be gotten rid of. Just wait till they get national health care and access to our medical records and control of what procedures get funded. It is a “brave new world” we live in.
Michael McCarthy

Mr. Neumayr implies Speaker Pelosi craves power as a means to an end: “Controlling life, controlling death, controlling costs. It’s all stimulus in the Brave New World utopia to come,” but as Orwell observed in another dystopia novel, power is not a means to an end but the end itself. This power grabbing is what is most frightening about the radicals on either end of the spectrum — they are so sure of their own (self) righteousness that they are absolutely certain of their right to help the unenlightened reaching nirvana (as defined by those in power). Sadly, Americans are quick only to recognize the hobnail iron boot of military fascism (even when it does not truly exist) but not the softer sandals of creeping intellectual/economic fascism (socialism/communism). Further, for a country founded upon Judeo/Christian ethics, we are quick to toss invectives at our local fundamentalists but are admonished by the PC crowd if we do a double take in Muslims’ direction.

The price of freedom has been reported to be eternal vigilance. We are currently at war, both overtly and covertly: the American way of life is threatened by domestic and foreign agents. A people that cannot recognize the shifting shape of extreme threats will a people that soon perishes from this earth.

Let us not forget the words to the preamble, “…and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” America was established on basis of hope and faith in the future, but where is the hope when the current Left leadership has its eyes on power for the sake of power and says to hell with “our posterity”?
Ira M. Kessel
Rochester, New York

HEROIC LENGTHS
Re: Reid Collins’s Worship Elsewhere:

I’ll take Reid Collins’ word for it:

“A hero, by modern standards, is one who disregards his own safety in order to aid others. Sully’s feat, a remarkable piece of airmanship, did not involve his leaving a place of safety in order to help the others. He was one of the others. His own tail was one of the 155 in such jeopardy.”

But let me suggest that Chesley Sullenberger is a hero — not for ditching the plane, but for walking its length. Twice. In waist-deep freezing water. With no one else onboard.
Dan Martin
Pittsburgh

Our son, like Cpt. “Sully,” was one of the few who went through the four years of character building at the Air Force Academy. It was four long years of hell, and your character, if not fully shaped by hard work and clear aspiration, would not have made it through unscathed. Sully’s character has been defined repeatedly through the years of flying, thinking safety and building his own business based on his own vision of safety. And, to top all that off he had glider pilot experience, some of which dated back to his years at the Academy.

Years of finely honed leadership, flying acumen, and great ability from years of experience. Just the person you want at the helm. Would it be that we had such at the helm of our Nation. I don’t know about you but give me a modest unassuming Cpt. Sully any time over some one who brags about himself and his policies and change all the time, with no great experience to give him an understanding if what he says is true.

Capt. Sully knows, like true heroes do, that he was in the right place at the right moment and is ready to move on. Give him his modesty and move on news folks. You have enough to do covering someone else who is blowing his own horn!
B. Gunn
Texas

I’ve seen one news show host — okay, it was Bill O’Reilly — go on about how there’s more to the crash than meets the eye. Whereas there are certain reports of problems with the airplane beyond that of geese being sucked into the engines, reports that require investigation, it subtracts nothing from Captain Sullenberger’s achievement of bringing the plane down safely in the Hudson with no loss of life — and just because a guy won’t come on a show doesn’t mean he has anything to hide.
Robert Nowall
Cape Coral, Florida

CORRELATE POTENTATES
Re: Stephen Moore & John Tamny’s Weak Dollars, Weak Presidents:

It was Milton Friedman, if I remember correctly, who pointed out the relationship between gold price and the strength of the dollar. If the dollar is weak, gold is high. Since commodities track the price of gold, it is safely argued that the weak dollar is inflationary. Witness the price of gasoline.
J. B. Layne

Although the captioned article was interesting within the confines of its thesis, I would daresay that the authors failed to establish anything beyond colinearity between dollar strength and presidential electoral outcomes. The conclusion they draw calling for a stronger dollar mischievously avoids providing the prescription for such an outcome and further failed to establish causality between presidential policy and dollar stature as it may be possible that actors beyond the president participate materially in its ebb and tide. However I do not want to punish the authors for scope beyond their intents.

Yet on the subject of a strong dollar, many prescriptions abound for its resuscitation one of which includes higher interest rates. If you accept that higher interest rates are part of the prescription, it is nigh unto impossible economically or politically given that the present administration is committed to trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see and that the voodoo economists guiding macro-economic decisions are hell-bent on driving interest rates low to spur economic activity. Such thoughts are delusional.

I advocate higher interest rates whether or not they contribute to a strong dollar because the regime of falling rates of the past 28 years is highly destructive to capital formation. Higher rates may in turn provide the adult restraint against such juvenile inclinations of stimulus packages and deficits of biblical proportions.

But in all fairness to the authors these comments are digressive from the merits of a strong dollar — however one may measure that.
David Bonn

DON‘T HARRY BARRY
Re: Jay D. Homnick’s Doing the Limbaugh:

If, as has been reported elsewhere, President Obama’s actual words were, “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done,” is it not possible that the so-called “alternative media” is doing precisely what they criticize the “mainstream media” for doing? That is, are conservatives columnists, bloggers, and talk show hosts taking the comment out of context and choosing to interpret it in a way that most advances their agenda?

It seems to me that a careful reading of the above quote does not provide the meaning that has been assigned to it. Is it perhaps more accurate to paraphrase the quote not as a slam on Limbaugh, but as an admonition that a leader must do more than simply listen to the radio, a leader must actually accomplish things? Could it be that the president’s actual meaning was more along the lines of, “You can’t just watch cooking shows and get dinner on the table”?

I am by no means President Obama’s most ardent supporter, but I would like to see “our side” demonstrate to “their side” what fairness really means.
Dan Davis

SAYING BAD THINGS
Re: W. James Antle, III’s Change Has Come:

What does it say about us as a country when we openly legislate infanticide, yet close military prisons housing fanatical murderers of innocents? How can we reconcile that lethal injection is cruel and unusual, find that Doctors cannot preside over or perform executions because of their Hippocratic Oath, and yet kill unborn children at will? The same people, who will attend a candlelight vigil outside of San Quentin on execution night, will march tomorrow to support Roe v. Wade. Somehow the contradictions do not compute.

The new president has made his position unambiguous on both issues during his less than substantial campaign, and yet he is still elected. Where are we going America?
Greg Mercurio
Vacaville, California

TOO MEAN, DAM IT
Re: Jim Powell’s Valley of the Dams:

This is really piling on. For example, Pennsylvania Power and Light had an ash storage pit (dam) recently fail at one of its coal fired power plants. If you want some meat, then note the incompetence of S. David Freeman when he was chairman of the TVA board. The rest of the board, many of whom were knowledgeable with power production, quit in protest when Freeman was appointed. So, Freeman did not have the opportunity to blame his failed policies on the members who quit.
George Silvestri

TAIL END OF IT
Re: Letters under “Fear of God” in Reader Mail’s Thrown Under the Bus:

It is striking that the theory of evolution is such a talisman and Holy Grail among atheists and many agnostics — especially since so many have scant interest in science otherwise. Why exactly do they get all atwitter at the thought of creationism or intelligent design entering the sacred groves of science class? I should think the theory of evolution could take care of itself among all these creampuffs — thank you very much.

Of course, the real answer is that K-12 schooling is only about education secondarily. The primary function of schooling the young is socialization and enculturalization. In other words, what shall we teach our children about the work of the world, about ourselves and our place in the world, what we value and what we believe? Most of these tasks can be done without religion (or science for that matter) getting into it; but no education can be done without touching on metaphysics (however briefly).

There is a subtext to the creationist/evolutionist wars that is very real but often we are only subconsciously aware of: are each of us the intentional handiwork of an all powerful and loving God or are we the dispassionate products of necessity and chance? Put this way, this is a question which most are not indifferent to its answer. Little wonder atheists and fundamentalists are at each other’s throats.

Of course, no one “owns” science. Nevertheless, the way each talk, atheists are manning the battlements of the science citadel while the fundamentalists are making the assault with savage siege machines. The Church, on the other hand, has historically little problem with the theory of evolution as a matter of science. What is a problem is when evolution becomes a philosophy of life — a task it has little competence to carry through. Fundamentalists utilize the Scriptures as a guide to science when in fact the writers of the Bible were/are addressing far distant matters. Fundamentalists (and not a few atheists) are under the mistaken notion that if one detail in Scripture is proven not to be true then the whole faith structure falls apart. The Church hardly thinks the Holy Ghost can be thwarted by such minutiae. Thus, instead of grasping the matter by the horns, both atheists and fundamentalists have grabbed the wrong end of the bull.
Mike Dooley

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