Letters to the Editor
MAV in Florida
Published Letters: 309 Editor's Choice: 22
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Conservatives and Physical Fitness
[Read the article: National Review's new tough guy, Mark Hemingway]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I was thinking about this last night after reading Glenn's column and all of your answers yesterday. I remembered that Suzanne Fields of the Unification Church's Washington Times wrote a column several years back sneering at all people, male and female, who work out at gyms. The gist of her complaint seemed to be that if they work out, they must be gay or just narcissistic.
Now I'm not saying all conservatives shun the gym or other forms of physical fitness. Far from it. But there does seem to be a subculture of men who show their masculinity by disdaining any attempt to improve the body as well as the mind. Maybe they regard it as unmanly. Remember Rep. Bob Dornan of California, who railed against Bill Clinton for going running when he was first in Washington? Dornan went into a shrieking fit over the fact that Clinton, like any other runner, wore shorts.
Yes, I know that Ted Kennedy and Michael Moore are fat too. But when I think of people like Jerry Falwell, Fred Varn, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and others, I'd say that they (bad pun ahead) outweigh them.
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I'd figured he'd kep trying to stay in the Senate...
[Read the article: Craig aide: He's probably resigning]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...because he didn't want to leave his buddy's behind!
(OK, I couldn't resist. Just had to get that one out of my system. :-P )
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Jobs, Schmobs
[Read the article: Economy loses jobs for the first time in four years]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I've always had reservations about those job numbers put out by the government since the Reagan administration found the way to cut unemployment was to simply drop unemployed people off the list. As Slackie said, we're running like hamsters. If a $20-per-hour job is eliminated, and replace by two people working $8-per-hour, I fail to see the improvement to the people working or to the economy as a whole. Sure, the conservative mantra would be "People (employers) are keeping more of their money." But that just means the amount of commerce is declining, not increasing.
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The impact will be felt for generations
[Read the article: The war claims the lives of two critics]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Bill Mauldin said that one cost of war we don't recognize is that young men who could have had great futures die before they realized their potential. In other words, cancer might have been cured by somebody who died in the Quang Tri offensive, or a stunning breakthrough in physics might have been made by somebody who died in the Korean War. Economists use the term "opportunity cost" for this sort of thing.
I think of that whenever I hear that another young man, or young woman, was killed in Iraq, fighting in a bungled and dead-end war for the ego of a spoiled son whose daddy got him into a "sorry, we're full" Air National Guard unit.
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The cause of their deaths is nothing to take solace about
[Read the article: The war claims the lives of two critics]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So they died in a truck accident instead of an explosion? Robert Scott, author of "God is my Co-Pilot," summed up those tragic accidents that take place in wartime by saying of one such fatal accident "It cost the enemy nothing." My dad was present when a group of men from the 26th Infantry Division drowned in a flooded river in Tennessee during World War II. It cost the Germans nothing, but their deaths were still part of the cost of war.
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A way for war supporters to support General Petraeus:
[Read the article: One-sided rules of political debate]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Perhaps a few of the people squalling about the MoveOn.org ad could show their support for General Petraeus by ENLISTING! Come on, all you strong young conservatives! Help fill out the ranks for Victory!
Oh...that's right....you guys don't do stuff like that.
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Oh, they want immigration all right....
[Read the article: The return of the "country club Republicans"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's not that Republicans don't want immigration, they just want a supply of gardeners, chauffers and nannies who will keep their mouths shut and not demand any rights. In that respect, they're remarkably like many Democratic politcians. Maybe the solutions is to make the District of Columbia a sort of free-trade zone for immigrants willing to take domestic jobs to make the lives of politcians easier.
Kemp tried to bring up similar arguments back in 1992, but he didn't get a lot of traction then with the GOP faithful.
After reading the piece the other day about questions in Fort Lauderdale from the sort of people Mike Huckabee calls "Shiite Republicans," I have to wonder where a Republcian candidate can now safely appear. Probably only at the country club.
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I'm just amazed his speeches aren't written in Reebus
[Read the article: A non-di-nahy-uhl di-nahy-uhl]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I actually agree with the posters who say that shouldn't be a big story, because news services regularly provide pronounciation guides of names in the news to broadcasters. But, too, people who say the president of the United States ought to have a little more intellectual horsepower are right. Plus, this is the Yale graduate, the guy who went to Haahvaahd Business School. And he has trouble with words that I knew in junior high school, such as Caracas and Mauritania (I became acquainted with that one because it was also the sister ship to the Lusitania, but I digress). Maybe this says more about those schools than it does about Bush.
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Anyway, back to Keith's cartoon....
[Read the article: The K Chronicles]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If we can all stop the name-calling for a minute, Keith has made a pretty amusing comment on mass protests: that 20,000 people descending on a town of 2,600 people has got to be good for business. The Chamber of Commerce types may be unhappy that the name of the town is now mud, but I bet they're crying all the way to the bank. Thanks, Keith, for pointing out something we'd all overlooked, and giving us something to wryly smile about.
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Waving under the partition
[Read the article: Well, it's like a stage, only different]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Well, he couldn't have been waving at the guy in the next staff just because he was out of paper. He's a congressman, he could have just used a few $10s and $20s.
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A clarification for Gobstruck:
[Read the article: Rush Limbaugh and the "phony soldiers"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The issue is NOT that only those who have served in the military can talk about the military. The issue is that those who have served in the military take umbrage at being called "phony" by chickenhawks who avoided military service. I don't think my years of manhandling recoil spades or figuring time-of-flight calculations give me special speech priveleges. But I do think that people who call me unpatriotic when they were determined to avoid any such inconveniuence to their lives are, well, I can't quite phrase it but the word "contemptible" keeps coming to mind.