Correspondence

...Men to whom such murders were nothing had to blow up the figure to millions...

...The ultimate source of all the damage that Big Labor does is the National Labor Relations Act...

...After all, Las Vegas—the capital of "Unironic America"—is the fastest-growing union town in the country...

...The administration never uttered another word about forcing such anonymous collections of inexpert, uninformed, and not disinterested opinion upon the teachers...

...In her review of The Sopranos, Melinda Ledden Sidak quotes a vulgarism from the movie, then makes a gratuitous reference to Strauss's alleged irreverence toward God...

...Actually, Gans appeared on Broadway in 1995...

...Such an education gives rise to a finely tuned conscience, and like a compass, this conscience would have guided this young student to make a choice other than murder...

...However, I was forced to depart from this presumption, at least momentarily, after reading "'Character' Talk Is Not Enough" (March 19...

...To his credit, Rushdoony believed execution to be impermissible without the testimony of two witnesses...

...a stronger word is in order...

...Character isn't knowledge, it's virtue...

...Therefore, I am duty-bound to register my unhappy surprise and even extreme displeasure with the hostility against, and libel of, the good name of Leo Strauss, and by implication, of Straussians of every stripe, in a journal like yours...

...My agreement with Ferguson departs at the point when he criticizes Bush for arguing that had the gunman known better the difference between right and wrong, this moral knowledge might have influenced him to not carry out the shooting...

...The reason so-called "character talk" is not enough is that the development of virtue takes many years, through steady discipline and closeness with God...

...Your magazine can do better than that...

...that civil law should be replaced by a form of Biblical law "to suppress, control, and/or eliminate the ungodly...

...Home and church have a lot to do with it...

...While Podhoretz mainly focuses on those who vacation in Las Vegas, he notes that, on the electoral map, "Las Vegas was Bush Red...

...JIM GOTHREAU Putnam, CT...

...So great it shouldn't be limited to teachers...

...NORMAN ODER Brooklyn, NY PAYCHECKMATE JEFF JACOBY AND MICHELLE MALKIN are correct in arguing that "paycheck protection" statutes will be easily evaded by union officials intent on preserving their power to spend the dues money of the workers they "represent" for political purposes ("One Cheer for Paycheck Protection," March 26...

...The implications are not difficult to draw...

...I would have expected this dig in the guise of humor, directed against the good name of Strauss from such so-called liberal publications as the New York Times or the New Republic...

...The core of the NLRA is its exclusive representation provision that enshrines a union, once voted in by a majority, as the sole bargaining representative for all the workers in the "unit," even those who prefer to deal directly with management themselves...

...No improvement in the honesty of the American professoriate is, however, likely until the gravest innovation of the late sixties is corrected—anonymous student evaluations of their teachers...

...AFTER READING Mike Murphy's opinions about China's bid to host the 2008 summer Olympics ("Beijing Goes for the Gold," March 19), I have to wonder if he has ever been to the country...

...Leithart describes Rushdoony as "eccentric...

...On the whole, I agree with most things it publishes, and am impressed by the high level of writing and editing...

...Teachers should give anonymous evaluations of administrators, upon which their salary and their continuation in office will hang...

...The comment dishonors all the students of Strauss who have written for the magazine...

...But even a national right-to-work statute does not go far enough...

...Since he is approaching retirement, perhaps the loss is balanced by the publicity he has gained for us...

...that "some people are by nature slaves and will always be so...

...J. BUDZISZEWSKI Austin, TX WESTERN UNION IN JOHN PODHORETZ'S COMMENT on Las Vegas ("Unironic America," March 26), he writes that impressionist Danny Gans "will probably never get an HBO special or a one-man show on Broadway...

...Death to those who oppose Holocaust denial...

...It seems to me that your usually independent stance on, and rigorously intelligent seriousness about, cultural matters has been compromised by a foolish comment that looks like it was meant to appease your enemies by soiling your own nest...

...Bush could have chosen a better label than "coward" when referring to the criminal in question...

...Rushdoony believed that democracy is "heresy" and "the great love of the failures and cowards of life...

...But to have to read it in The Weekly Standard...

...They beamed with optimism while speaking of their developing market economy and more recently attained individual freedoms...

...Like most Americans, I had many preconceived notions about mainland China, its people, their attitudes, and their lifestyles...

...KEN MASUGI Claremont, CA RETHINKING RUSHDOONY PETER LEITHART praises the Reverend Rousas J. Rushdoony as an "American original" and a "thoroughly American intellectual—in the old-fashioned sense" ("Old Geneva & the New World," March 26...

...Rushdoony thought that a generation nurtured on violent entertainment and media "could not be expected to react to a murder or two," and, therefore, the extent of the Holocaust was exaggerated in order to shock a desensitized world: "Did the Nazis actually execute many thousands, tens, or hundreds of thousands of Jews...

...KENNETH GREEN Toronto, Canada I WAS SHOCKED to see THE WEEKLY STANDARD tarnish the reputation of the most profound twentieth-century American political philosopher, Leo Strauss...

...From the big cities to the small villages, my wife and I met countless locals...

...The penalty for false witness is, unsurprisingly, execution...

...DAVID CANTOR New York, NY CHARACTER COUNTS HAVING CLOSELY READ the tightly reasoned and thorough articles of Andrew Ferguson for some time now, I always give your senior editor a presumption of correctness as soon as I see his name attached to an article...

...Indeed, there is a substantial probability that the gunman would not have conceived or carried out his murderous plan had he been strongly educated in the basic notions of right and wrong (i.e., character...

...But these should be dealt with by other means...

...school, much less...

...The problem is that he was willing to do it anyway...

...No doubt the gunman knew quite well the wrong of pumping bullets into his schoolmates...

...While Leithart acknowledges that Rushdoony advocated the death penalty as a possible punishment for abortion, adultery, sodomy, and incest, he omits other law-breakers whom Rushdoony believed worthy of execution, including incorrigible juvenile delinquents, blasphemers, and "propagators of false doctrines...

...The evils were all too real: even greater is the evil of bearing false witness concerning them...

...But Bush's claim—that solid character education could have very well stayed his hand from the gun—is quite indisputable...

...Ferguson did not fully comprehend what President Bush was trying to communicate when he briefly talked about character education in the wake of the Santana High School Tragedy...

...Very old-fashioned...

...Its flippancy aside, the slander reinforces a prejudice about Strauss that serious scholars and journals aim to challenge and that, moreover, Strauss himself repudiated in writing after writing...

...Repeal of the NLRA should be our long-term goal...

...The point was appreciated at one college where, all rational arguments having failed, a professor declared: "This is a great idea...

...This offense was exemplified by "the false witness borne during World War II with respect to Germany...

...I take strong exception to her remark...

...The Associated Press reviewer praised Gans's talent and likability but said his act was much better suited "for a relaxed nightclub setting, preferably after you have had a couple of drinks and are ready to put up with the assembly-line format of quickly listening to one famous voice after another...

...Character education in our schools—that is, education with respect to moral right and wrong—is not only an American tradition, it is also an essential aim of a free and civil society...

...because his act doesn't have any kind of edge...

...Actually, Las Vegas and surrounding Clark County voted for Al Gore, while the state went for Bush...

...These, and his many similar ideas, have not characterized American intellectuals since intellectuals burned witches...

...Until we get rid of the NLRA, they will continue to act as the worst sort of monopolists...

...I had agreed with almost everything she had written up to that point, but I was genuinely puzzled and dismayed by that unnecessary and low dig, and the remark soured me on an otherwise sprightly review...

...JASON RANEW Akron, OH ANDREW FERGUSON'S ARTICLE about the latest school shooting makes many good points, but misses the crucial one...

...While he did not have the influence to be truly evil, to portray Rushdoony as a benign, admirable, classically American contrarian, is a whitewash...

...MICHAEL PLATT Cedar Springs, UT GIVE CHINA A CHANCE...

...Unions ought to have to sell their services on an individual, voluntary basis just as other service businesses do...

...By any standard, that was an unfair, untrue, and unnecessary remark in an otherwise intelligent critique of the drooling, by both liberals and conservatives, over The Sopranos...

...Imagine my surprise, then, in reading Melinda Ledden Sidak's review of The Sopranos, where in passing she gratuitously makes Tony Soprano "a secret disciple of Leo Strauss," because Tony forcefully "counsels" his son to embrace hypocrisy about religion ("Mob Mentality," March 26...

...Criticism of China's strong and often oppressive central government remains justified, and human rights violations assuredly do remain...

...GEORGE C. LEEF Raleigh, NC THE GOOD FIGHT April W. Susky ("Correspondence," March 19) is certainly right that Harvey Mansfield's change from his long practice of issuing grades as he sees them leaves the ranks of the informal fraternity of honest teachers thinner, even without our captain, for Mansfield has long fought the good fight...

...These have pressured teachers into thinking that pleasing students before the end of a term is more important than educating them...

...These mostly media-generated images proved incredibly useless when I actually had the opportunity to spend time in China in 1998 and 2000...

...They who have files on you—and you, no files on them—will rule you, and not always pleasantly...