Correspondence
The Horror of Hillary While I agree with much of what John Podhoretz says in his analysis of the upcoming Rudy Giuliani-Hillary Clinton New York Senate race, I must take issue with several of his...
...Benjamin Zycher Agoura Hills, CA Laying Down the Law Reviewing my book In Defense of Natural Law ("Natural Born Lawyers," Dec...
...And that is why Hillary Clinton must be defeated, regardless of such important but narrower issues as partial-birth abortion...
...Whatever the measure, the immensely gifted King far surpasses Shelley...
...The dirty little secret that everyone knows but prefers to avoid is that gay activists such as the Log Cabin Republicans are homosexuals first and everything else second...
...By any rational analysis, King is the superior writer...
...As for pretty language, King is no Keats, but neither is Shelley...
...The Horror of Hillary While I agree with much of what John Podhoretz says in his analysis of the upcoming Rudy Giuliani-Hillary Clinton New York Senate race, I must take issue with several of his points ("The Importance of Beating Hillary," Dec...
...O.M...
...The Left must defeat Giuliani because a failure to do so will vindicate the clearest possible repudiation of its principles...
...Daniel John Sobieski Chicago, IL Log Cabin Fever In a seemingly candid piece of reporting, Tucker Carlson neatly sidesteps the real problem created by public meetings between Republican party politicians and gay activist groups ("Log Cabin Blues," Dec...
...Thus, no American in a leadership position appears either ready or able to point out the obvious, common-sense distinction between the valid dignity and rights of homosexuals as individuals, and the pernicious absurdity of conferring undeserved respectability on homosexuality as a practice...
...One wonders what the media reaction would have been had Dan Quayle or George W. Bush so politically exploited the birth of Jesus...
...Like them or not, we know King's characters completely...
...But political correctness makes cowards of us all...
...But she wasn't the first...
...Such a regime in this country would soon make Amsterdam look like a religious retreat...
...To be Correspondence taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child...
...It is instead ideological: Giuliani's tenure as mayor has shattered the leftist religion about the root causes of crime, the preservation of public disorder as a component of "liberty," collective rather than individual responsibility, ad infinitum...
...20), J. Budziszewski claims that I hold certain truths to be self-evident "because they are built into the reasoning mind itself...
...Giuliani will win based on a combination of his record and some of the intractable problems that Hillary Clinton has created for herself...
...They're both for abortion...
...Ditto for gun control...
...Thomas Aquinas on natural law is also flawed...
...Over the years, his "prose, never immortal, got good enough that you rarely noticed it...
...The head of the Conservative party in New York has stated flat-out that under no condition will Giuliani get the Conservative party endorsement due to his position on abortion...
...Self-evidence lies not in the way the world is put together, but in the way the mind is put together...
...Mary Shelley's monster story, Frankenstein, has spawned a cottage industry of taxpayer-funded academic criticism, so we can't disqualify King from the literary canon merely because of his subject manner...
...Now he should take the second and admit that, even as we speak, King is writing the literature of our age...
...Budziszewski's exposition of the teaching of St...
...On the contrary, we can disqualify him only if canonical authors like Shelley perform acts of artistic magic that King can't match...
...For a presentation of Aquinas's thought that properly takes account of the role of practical principles in his natural law theory, readers should consult John Finnis's careful and comprehensive new study Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory...
...And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem...
...vice President Al Gore has also shamelessly exploited and distorted the Christmas Gospel to foster a liberal political agenda...
...So what drove Joseph and Mary from their home was not a shortage of affordable housing, not mean-spirited budget cuts in the social safety net by Roman senators, but taxes mandated by the Roman equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service...
...22, 1997, while announcing new spending programs for the homeless and trying to drum up support for another big government solution, Gore made the following comment: "And speaking from my religious tradition in this Christmas season, 2,000 years ago a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child in a manger because the inn was full...
...Robert P. George Princeton, NJ Gore's "Homeless"Jesus As David Brooks noted in your editorial, contributing to the "mind-lessness about homelessness" was none other than a woman who has never owned a home herself, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who proclaimed Mary and Joseph to be a homeless couple ("Mind-lessness About Homelessness," Dec...
...OstlundJr...
...Those who also trouble themselves to have a look at my own writings will find that, far from rejecting Aquinas's approach to favor an "Enlightenment" alternative, as Budziszewski imagines I do, my thought is fully in line with Aquinas's teachings about the basic precept of natural law...
...This has nothing to do with his personality, the Brooklyn Museum controversy, the homeless, police shootings, or other such matters...
...The truth is that not only were they not homeless, they were in fact on a journey in response to a government mandate to collect taxes, this woman and her gainfully employed husband leaving their home in Nazareth to travel to Bethlehem...
...Phillip Mink Newark, DE...
...Several weeks ago, Clinton's spokesman said with a straight face that the campaign would be about issues, not personalities...
...I agree that conservatives will rally around Rudy Giuliani in order to stop Hillary Clinton, but the last thing that this Senate campaign will be decided on are the true ideological differences between conservatives and liberals...
...And all went to be taxed, everyone into his own city...
...Shelley's Dr...
...Is it that obvious...
...Shelley smothers us with cliches in portraying Frankenstein's family relationships...
...Arthur M. Shatz Bayside, NY John Podhoretz's strong articulation of the importance of beating Hillary Clinton in the forthcoming New York Senate race is not strong enough...
...As such, their ostensible goal of a "place at the table" is merely a pit stop en route to their main objective: full societal acceptance of homosexuality as "normal...
...And by "elevating his pulp," he has created "successful middlebrow fiction...
...Republicans (and what passes in some circles these days for conservatives) know this, being marginally less in thrall to utopian ideology than their leftist counterparts...
...In short, the New York City turnaround has answered the basic ideological question of whether societies can flourish when the Left achieves its central goal of making people more rather than less dependent upon government...
...Yeah, right...
...As Last points out, King's early works are "good, juicy, satisfying pulp, but nothing more...
...To state that a Giuliani-Clinton race "may represent the only clear-cut ideological battle we'll see in the next year in which stark differences between Republicans and Democrats will be aired in a far more open and direct way," ignores that there are no differences between Mayor Giuliani and Hillary Clinton on several battleground issues...
...Frankenstein develops a case of stupidity so severe that he can't deduce the monster's flagrantly obvious plan to murder his wife...
...State College, PA The Literary King Jonathan V. Last devotes considerable time and effort to Stephen King, "the single most popular pulp writer of the twentieth century" ("King of the Hill," Dec...
...Last has taken the first step in acknowledging this reality by admitting that King is worthy of discussion...
...But what does Shelley accomplish in Frankenstein that King does not in The Shining (one of his early "pulp" novels...
...King's stories build tension from beginning to end, and they make sense within the world he imagines...
...I quote from Luke, the controlling legal authority: "And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed...
...It leaves completely out of account the great medieval theologian's understanding of moral reasoning as an irreducibly practical (as opposed to "theoretical" or "descriptive") enterprise...
...Further, to say that Giuliani has "some lingering problems in New York" is putting it mildly...
...So why do we call Frankenstein literature and The Shining pulp...
...For left-liberals, of course, this is just peachy keen, as it gives them the formidable advantage of gay political support, along with another opening to posture as morally superior to their evil, "gay bashing" opponents...
...Of course, if Mary and Joseph had waited 2,000 years, Al and Hillary could have invited them to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom—for a small fee, of course...
...Not only do I not hold this view, I explicitly reject it on page 89 of the very book Budziszewski is reviewing...
...The Left—Leninists all, for whom any act or falsehood in pursuit of their political goals is justified—will stop at nothing to defeat Rudy Giuliani...
...This specious charge, to the smug delight of liberals, is almost never challenged, since any serious rebuttal would have to include an unpopular but unavoidable truth: A society's embrace of sodomy as a civil right, with full minority-group status for homosexuals, would be the glass of water that finally overflowed the bathtub, leading inevitably to that society's utter destruction...
...On Dec...
...Caesar Augustus apparently did not believe that the era of big government was over...
Vol. 5 • January 2000 • No. 16
