WIRED
Re: The Digital Spectator:

Thank you for your online and your hardcopy magazine. Good writing, piquant language, topics that I care about, and your obvious love of freedom, and lack of fear. You are good intellectual and cultural company.
— P. Gattey

I feel like a kid at Christmas and thanks for the great surprise!!

What does Mr. Pleszczynski drink? We owe him a few beers for this one.
— Joe Weldon
Juno Beach, Florida
(A very happy subscriber)

Wlady Pleszczynski replies: Mr. Weldon is very kind, but all champagne (and flowers) should be sent to our managing editor, Amy Mitchell.

THANKFUL
Re: Abigail Palmer’s My Kingdom for the Pill:

I truly appreciated Mrs. Abigail Palmer’s article on “Candy Catholics.” The caliber of her insight (the ultimate commitment of her epistemological consciousness) is truly refreshing. For there, I saw Christ.
— Pastor Michael Harkness

Thanks for your article. I’m tired of spoiled, so called “progressive” Catholics trying to speak for me. I’m also tired of being almost the only Catholic I know who doesn’t use birth control. You’re right. We NEED those hard sayings. Thanks for saying it.
— Jenny Aubert
Wills Point, Texas

WELCOME BACK, AL
Re: David Holman’s An American Travesty:

The worst thing about Tennessee is that it produced Al Gore. The best thing about Tennessee is that it kept him from the White House in 2000.
— Jerry Gardner
Knoxville, Tennessee

Mr. Holman deserves thanks for helping to keep Algore on the radar screen. I sincerely hope the former VP does not wear out his welcome in the MSM as I suspect he has to some degree already. I have never been able to understand the accolades prescribed to him for his intellect and vision and the more we see and hear of him the more it becomes painfully obvious to anyone other than the really extreme left that the man is a nut case. Keeping Algore front and center or at the very least visible at every opportunity is a very good thing for Republicans and our elected Republicans need his help because they sure don’t always help themselves.
— Roger Ross
Tomahawk, Wisconsin

“‘Gore, the thinker of big thoughts; Gore, the visionary; Gore, the radical; Gore, the bold man of the left.’ This time around he is also Gore, the Southern statesman, wise from his years in the Senate.”

How about “Gore, the parody of himself, bloated and bloviating as only a political has-been/never-was can.” At least Billy Bob Clinton was entertaining.
— Ed Callahan
La Habra, California

So “E Pluribus Unum: Out of one, many” Al Gore — inventor of the Internet, champion of the Earth’s environment, utterer of “If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure” — also saved this country from attacks on the judiciary by his attempt to win the 2000 election through the judiciary, not the people? Oh, brother.

Gore is the perfect spokesman for MoveOn.org and the core of the Democrat Party and its leadership in and out of Congress, as well as liberals and leftists across the fruited plain. His past words speak to his qualification: “When you have the facts on your side, argue the facts. When you have the law on your side, argue the law. When you have neither, holler.”

Old Holler should go back to Tennessee, or wherever he lives, and spare us all the painful embarrassment of his publicly shared wisdom, or lack thereof.
— C. Kenna Amos Jr.
Princeton, West Virginia

Would that Al Gore gets the nomination in ’08. He reminds me so much of John Kerry: the conviction that he’s smarter than anyone else leading to a faint but ever-detectable sneer. He’s rich and spoiled, resulting in the unintended hilarity of his attempts to relate to the “little man.” The constant makeovers: ladies and gents, you see before you the “real” Al Gore! The stilted, wooden, yet shrill style that embodies his discomfort with human contact. The faux religion that reads as discomfort when he’s trying for spiritual sincerity. The deception that he’s from a real American place (rural Tennessee or New England) when he’s really from inside the beltway or France. All right, now I’m confusing myself so I’ll stop, but really, wouldn’t he make a great candidate?
— Robin Boult
Murfreesboro, Tennessee

Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and the myriad of former elected officials who actively meddle in the affairs of state long after their tenure of elated office is over should take example from General Douglas Macarthur who at his final Farwell at West Point uttered the famous phrase, “Old soldiers never die, the just fade away” Mr. Carter, and Mr. Gore should take example of this and just fade away.

Their continuing meddling will do absolutely nothing to improve their image that America has of them contrary to their belief.
— Melvin L. Leppla
Jacksonville, North Carolina

Re: Former VP Al Bore and “An American Travesty”

One must give the former VP a lot of credit. His crusade to corner the market on ignorance is never ending.
— Kelso Sturgeon
Cow Paddie, Nevadee

LET’S GO TO THE VIDEOTAPE
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell’s The Politics of Personal Quotation:

Thank you for a great “read.”
— Ken

Great article, will have something to chuckle about all day. I just love when the weird left have their words given back to them.
— Elaine Kyle
Cut & Shoot, Texas

We must remember that the advocacy (mainstream) media is the genuine Weapon of Mass Distortion in America.

So, thank you for acknowledging the importance of James Taranto’s Best of the Web Today at the Wall Street Journal‘s Opinionjournal.com and Brett Bozell’s Media Research Center. Daily I check BOTWT and get MRC’s CyberAlert. They superbly and thoroughly nail Democrats, liberals and leftists with the DLL’s own words. TAS ranks right up there with BOTWT and MRC, too.

Thanks, also, for the thigh-slapper about the advocacy media “curiously” not reporting MRC’s “2005 DisHonors Awards: Roasting the Most Outrageously Biased Liberal Reporters of 2004.” In your dreams, right? After all, how could they spin in their favor such things like the “John Kerry Suck-Up Award” and “Al Franken Award for the Stupidest Analysis Award”?
— C. Kenna Amos Jr.
Princeton, West Virginia

LIBERAL FUTILITY
Re: Judd Magilnick’s Who’s Got Appendicitis Now?:

The definition of insanity, someone once said, is to keep doing the same thing over and over, failing, and all the while anticipating different results.

This has become the left in a nutshell.

From welfare to education, social security to taxation, America’s liberal elite clings blindly to the ideology of class warfare and America while the world passes them by. The redistributionist philosophies of taxation and social engineering continue to wreck havoc on European mega-states but France is still to be admired! The Canadian health system kills patients awaiting simple operations from rationing and long bureaucratic waiting periods but it is still better than ours! George W. Bush has brought democracy to tens of millions in the middle east, from Afghanistan and Iraq, and now may set the stage for a dozen or more ‘soft’ revolutions in Lebanon, Egypt, Kuwait….but this is accidental and his real motive was OIL FOR TEXAS BILLIONAIRES……and the left drones on and on.

How can rational minds continue to hold onto failed concepts even as a wealth of objective data shows that they are wrong? In one word: universities.

Scratch a liberal and you will find a zealot equal to any medieval witch hunter; they have been taught to believe things are true because they ARE true and their critics are evil! The university system, that ivory tower of solicitude has grown their minds in the dark caves of isolation where one sided philosophies rule the darkness and proselytizing high priest and priestesses shout the one truth. In this cave of rational darkness young minds are warped without the light of new ideas and sent off into the world as fully indoctrinated pilgrims. Many will shrug off the effects of Noam Chomsky or a Marxian economist once reality is again entered but many will keep the emotionally laden teachings of their youth dear to heart if for no other reason than it was the first instance of truly adult thought and therefore a thing to be cherished in remembrance. How can the minds of the future be saved? There is no quick fix, that being the stuff of election year spending bills. Reform the heart of the educational system and start the long and painful journey from the darkness of blind ideology into objective reason. Bring fresh voices into the night and let young scholars taste from a smorgasbord of intellects.

We’re talking about tenure. Tenure was once given as a reward to seasoned educators for years of fruitful scholarship and teaching, an informal working retirement in place so aging educators might rest on their laurels and, hopefully, achieve a deeper objectivity as elder statesmen amidst the hustle and bustle of hungrier and more active professors. Today tenure is a guarantee of lifetime employment voted on and guaranteed by cabals of fellow travelers who vote like-minded priests of political correctness onto pillars. The tenure system, as seen today, has devolved and with it the quality of education in America’s universities.

The solution? End the tenure system. A competent teacher will always find work in the real world while lesser minds will have to prove their worth as any common volk must. Let the educators face the same standards of accomplishment and competence that their charges must all face in life. Let the light of change enter into the now darkened corridors of scholarship.

How does one cure appendicitis? Kill the germs that infect the body. While no one is contemplating a similar course of action for real people we may all be helped by a cleansing ray of warm light now and then.
— Bill Sluis
Oak Creek, Wisconsin

When I was stationed at Ft. Bragg in the early ’70s I recall, I think, some in the 82d Airborne Division wore something called the Dom Rep Badge.

Is this another case of superior Marine public relations?
— W.N. Dunning
Clarke County, Virginia

In re Judd Magilnick’s piece about the Dominican Intervention, Tom Lehrer was, at the time in question, a professor at Harvard, not MIT.
— W. B. Heffernan, Jr. (Board-Certified Pedantic Nit-Picker)

SOME SYSTEM
Re: David Hogberg’s Another Dose of Krugman:

I just got back from a trip to Canada, where the Toronto Globe & Mail published a short note: Companies in Quebec are doing a brisk business referring patients to American doctors.

Canada has had a public health care “system” for years. ‘Nuff said.
— unsigned

CONDI’S REARGUARD
Re: Lou Venticinque’s letter (under “Rice Capades”) in Reader Mail’s Cautionary Verses:

Let me get this straight, Condi, within six months was supposed to believe that terrorists would fly planes into buildings, when the Clinton administration didn’t do it in eight years. Under her watch we went to war with too few troops? That wasn’t even near her decision to make. She wasn’t Secretary of Defense was she? In any event, the battlefield commanders make the decision on the number of troops they need to enter into battle with. North Korea. I don’t seem to recall any “pleading” with the loony from the north, by Condi, or anybody else in the Bush administration. It all seems to have been a series of rather stern warnings. The pleading in fact was from Jimmy Carter, who uninvited, showed up in North Korea and made a deal, that was immediately broken by Kim Jong il. Iran. Iran became what is today, once again, with the help of the gutless Jimmy Carter, who did zip, zero, nada, to them when our people were taken hostage. Finally, China. China is becoming a nuclear superpower with the help, for eight years, of the Clinton administration, who sold and traded advanced missile technology in exchange for campaign contributions from the Chinese military. It’s strange how liberals view of history, is the picture in front of their face. To view more than that would let them see the shortcomings and mistakes of their own leaders.
— Jeff Goff

FUNDAMENTALLY ABSENT
Re: “Atheist Theology” letters in Reader Mail’s Cautionary Verses and Bruce Thompson’s letter (under “Kung Catholics”) in Reader Mail’s Cut & Shoot Republicans and Jerry Rushing’s letter (under “Reforming by Conserving”) in Reader Mail’s Bolton’s Army:

Since I am admittedly not a Catholic theologian, can someone tell me where I can find the word “purgatory” in the Bible?
— Bruce Thompson

YANKEE FRIENDLY
Re: “Our Erstwhile Ally” letters in Reader Mail’s Cautionary Verses and “Protecting Even Canada” letters in Reader Mail’s Partial Political Abortion:

I have answered this type of response in the Reader Mail before. To all Americans, please understand that there are many Canadians who disagree with Mr. Unsigned and please do not lump us all together. We appreciate our American cousins even though we are separated by a common language.

Canada stood by the US in many wars. My Regiment was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation in Korea for the Battle of Kapyong where we stood off the Chinese who outnumbered us 9 to 1 while the Americans in the reserve position had withdrawn. We were also in Afghanistan where the same Canadian Regiment also rescued some American Rangers under heavy sniper fire and were taking huge casualties. We also had to take in the chin twice when we had friendly fire casualties in Afghanistan. During 9/11 we took many Americans into our homes who were stranded in Canada due to the grounding of international flights. But I guess its “What have you done for us lately?” that really matters. This is not how allies treat each other.

I agree that the US has largely underwritten Canada’s defense. Most of us find this deplorable and humiliating. It is hard to dislodge such irresponsible government when they are continually using taxpayers dollars to finance remaining in power (see the Gower Inquiry on misuse of Public Works funds). Look how long it took Republicans to get control of Congress and multiply by a million times infinity and you will have an inkling of what I am talking about.

My father raised me to respect Americans and ensured that we visited the US extensively. He ensured that we appreciated their generosity and the fact that wherever there is a tragedy, the US is usually there first to help. Neither did he permit me to avoid facing the potential confrontation of reminding my countrymen of this as well. Believe me, there are many Canadians who think the same and if it was our choice, we would have been in Iraq with you.

One other point. There are only 28 million Canadians. Of that only about 6-8 million are eligible to vote. Far more people in the US voted for Kerry and the anti Iraq platform. So, we Canadians should be the least of your worries.
— “A True North Strong and Free Ally”