I did my medical school training in Richmond, Virginia, spending many hours at the huge VA hospital there. This was 1993-97, and I can say without hesitation that the care there was very poor. As medical students we did what we could for the vets, but our impact was limited because the hospital and the outpatient clinics were manned by people who simply did not give a damn what happened to the patients.

VA employees have civil service protection and are nearly impossible to fire, which means they have no incentives to be productive. Most of the time when we were on the units at the VA, we assumed that we were would receive no staff help. We drew our own blood, rolled patients to tests, and visually checked to be sure the patients were getting the right medications. (On one occasion we had two patients in the same room and one was getting the other's chemotherapy.)

As another poster said, Walter Reed is nothing new. The VA system is what you get when federal bureaucracy runs a hospital system. If anyone in Washington really cares, they will shut down the VA system and sign contracts with private providers for care. Medicare does this and it works just fine for them, and Medicare has far more patients than the VA ever will.

Why is it that a football coach can be verbally abusive but a teacher or a parent cannot? Answer: Because the kids know that if they don't listen to Coach they will ride the bench or worse, be cut from the team. With parents and teachers, there is no such penalty. Coaches have something that kids want bad: the key to the door of respect. So the kids take abuse from Coach in a way they would never take it from Teacher or Mom and Dad.

I don't think there is any need for obscenities, but as for hard words, yeah, what the f**k. Kids need to know that their parents can get angry at them, very, very angry, and that provoking Mom or Dad has serious consequences. I don't want my kids to be afraid of me, but you know what? Better fear than disrespect. Ask Coach.

Why I have always liked you: Tolerance is your dispostion, your muse, your clothing. Tolerance is a good in itself, to be to worked for like summer vegetables and the perfect Christmas roast.

When did we set tolerance aside? Who decreed that to tolerate another is to endorse his values, instead of what it really is, old-fashioned Christian love? The Current Occupant? The Calvinists? Perhaps those lowdowns who know it is easier to sell something on monthly installments to somebody who lives in fear.

Yes, that's what it is.

Thanks, GK.

The problem with sex offenders is that they do not do us the favor disappearing from the face of the earth. Once they have completed their debt to society, they go back into the world. This is what they should do.

We can't ostricize people for life after they can been convicted of a crime. If we won't accept them back into society, then we should do the manly thing and either quarantine them for life in special jails or execute them. But it is unfair to release a person into society, tell them the myth that they are "free," and then proceed to strip their freedom of any meaning.

Sex offenders can be reintegrated into society on some level. Maybe if we are serious about helping the people who volunteer their presence, those who are in hiding will step forward.

The book review section is without a doubt my favorite part of the newspaper. When I got the Wall Street Journal often the book review was the only thing I read to the end in the entire paper. When I get the Sunday NY Times, on Monday I toss everything except the book review section and the Times Magazine. Those I savor the entire week.

A good book review isn't just a way to rate books. It is an essay in and of itself, and I usally approach them the same way I approach Op/Ed pieces. But book reviews are better than Op/Ed pieces by far because Op/Ed is focused only on recent news, and book reviews can be about anything. When was the last time you read an Op/Ed piece about Alexander the Great?

A top notch book review doesn't simply answer the question "I liked/did not like this book because . . . ." It is a riff on the thoughts in the book, and sometimes the reviewer's response to the book is more interesting than the thoughts in the book itself.

There is no way for me to read everything that is out there. I use reviews to scan what's out there, and cherry pick the best. And for many books, a review is as good as reading it. 2000 words on "The World Is Flat" pretty much covers the book, and the same goes for George Tenet's new book, I suspect. On the other hand, some reviews clearly leave the impression that there is much more in the book than the essay discusses -- those are the books I buy.

I don't see how one can say book reviews don't sell books. The problem, however, is that I will read a review and may not get the book for months, or even years. Books take time to read and are not always an impulse buy. Book time and retail time are completely different.