Dear Salon:

What this recent disclosure about the wiretapping of U.S. Citizens without warrents indicates is how meaningless all of these so-called rights are in actual practice. How impossible it is to stop a president from violating the law before or during-the-fact.

The only thing that prevents a president from breaking the law is his own respect for it. There are no enforcement mechanisms and there are no "checks and balances" until it is too late and even then, they are pretty impotent.

If the president is impeached, I will be proven to be wrong and I hope oh-so-much that I am.

Sincerely yours,

Arthur C. Hurwitz

Dear Salon:

I am afraid that Mr. Hirsch ignores one aspect of his return to observance, and that is the orthodox community's implicit and indirectly implied opposition to Liberalism and its parallel embrace of Republican politics in the name of "family values." Mr. Hirsch may claim to to be nonpolitical but the default politics in the Orthodox community today, especially the community of the newly observant, is Republican and right-wing.

In such a contact Jack Abramoff could occassionally engage in some sort of Jewish religious ritural, such as putting on Tefilin or lighting a Hannuka menorah, and then be embraced as "one-of-them" or at least a sympathizer and an important one in a high place at that. Other Jews, who would oppose this sort of corruption and by extension, the Republican party, would be called "self-hating" or "off the path." One of the implict but never explicitly stated roles of becoming orthodox is a rejection of the Jewish liberal tradition, which is supposingly unrealistically utopian and therefore anti-G-d.

In other words, the notion of "The Truth" is left only to

G-d and the performance of his commandements but ignored completely and everywhere else in the political and public policy sphere because since everything else is up to G-dit really doesn't matter what man does.

Sincerely yours,

Arthur C. Hurwitz

Dear Editor:

Since Bernard Henri Levy, like many European intellectuals who idealize the United States, fails to understand two essential qualities about American politics and intellectuals at this particular historial juncture, he also fails to understand the true nature of the system here.

Mr. Henri Levy fails to understand that there are no independent intellectual figures here such as his truly. This means that all functions of the intellegensia are functions of different institutions such as the press, the academy, professional writers and the like. This also means that in the end, being an intellectual in this country is a career and not a calling which gives the individual a special status in the society. In other words, it is a job, and one has to keep it so one can continue to live.

The result is figures like William Kristol, who

Mr. Henri Levy would like to understand as a fellow intellectual of his status. Unfortunately, he fails to understand that William Kristol has made a career for himself, and that "career" is to be a journalist who supports the Republican Party and to do this, i.e. to do his job properly, he needs to support all of its positions and echo whatever attacks that institution makes on its enemies. To put it another way, he is a propagandist and therefore, he is willing to tow the line.

The right-wing propaganda machine of the past 25 years has also created a kind of polarization of politics that does not exist in France, or any European country. In the absence of a parliamentry system and in the absence of coalition government, if one supports the main policy tenents of a given party, one is compelled to tacitly support all of that party's positions, otherwise one might be weakening their message and delegitimizing its campaign.

In other words, he just doesn't get it, and that is often the problem foreigners, and sometimes even its own citizens, have when dealing with the United States.

Sincerely,

Arthur C. Hurwitz