Correspondence

...The downside is that this takes time away from dealing with whether Gore's policy proposals are consistent with Clinton's and are likely to bring about continuing prosperity...

...Ultimately, one must ask who the real radical is here: the big-bucks adoption industry lobby, led by the well-financed National Council for Adoption, who stigmatize adoptees in the United states by promoting shame and subverting the free flow of public records...

...Second, while I won't argue that party and ideological labels are no longer relevant, they are clearly less relevant in the current political environment than they were during the Cold War...

...What about an ad showing Lieberman on the Senate floor decrying the president's behavior and then cutting away to the post-impeachment celebration with the vice president proclaiming his boss one of our greatest presidents...

...He writes, "By the time Clinton left the stage at Willow Creek, his audience of hostile evangelicals was in tears...

...Nonsense...

...In fact, my Republican roots go back to my Garrisonian great-great-grandfather, a station master on the Underground Railroad...

...Then I read Joseph Epstein's article on dining and "schwantz de boeuf" ("Eating Out," Aug...

...Although at times local congressional elections are decided on national issues, more often than not they are decided on issues specific to the congressional district being contested...

...Clearly Bill used Bill...

...The last paragraph of Wattenberg's review speaks volumes about why so many conservatives seem comfortable talking only to each other...

...What Ferguson overstates, however, is the evangelical loathing of Bill Clinton...

...Open records are a matter of simple justice and dignity...

...When I asked in our interview why she calls mothers "breeders," she said, "I don't like parents...

...While there certainly were critics in the audience, a significant segment of evangelical leadership has already been softened up, or Clintonized, for some time...

...I had never attended a leadership conference at Willow Creek, but I was scheduled to attend the conference in August...

...I'm simply carrying on the family tradition of Republican social responsibility...

...Several weeks ago my disorientation was aggravated by the convention in Los Angeles at which it seemed we might move to the bright sunlit uplands of a cure for insomnia...

...That's just me personally, and I have to stop that...

...second, they can try to disassociate Gore from the positive Clinton economic results...

...HAVING BEEN INTERVIEWED by Ira Carnahan at length for his article, "The Rise of 'Bastard Nation,'" I was disappointed to find little of what we discussed appear in the final article (Sept...

...As an evangelical who believes that we are champions of God's revealed truth, I am at times deeply concerned that we are so easily taken in by style and appearance and a desire to be successful rather than faithful...

...Many thanks to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and to Epstein for the funniest single line I have read in many years...

...The government should not be in the business of laundering the identities of the some 6 million adopted people in the U.S...

...Lieberman the vice-presidential candidate, the senator serves as a shield or vaccine against Clinton...

...My grandfather and great-grandfather on the other side of the family were friends of William McKinley, Mark Hanna, James Grant, and Myron T. Herrick, and often played host to them in their homes...

...BOB WENZ Derwood, MD HELPING BUSH WIN WHILE I AGREE with parts of William Kristol's "How Bush Can Win," there are other parts with which I strongly disagree (Sept...

...today...

...The Bush campaign, which always had a small needle to thread, has not taken a consistent path here and thus has achieved neither objective...

...It gets me in trouble...

...My introduction to politics came in 1947 when my dad pinned a Dewey button on me and forever changed my life...

...Unable to grasp why rock (in one form or another) overwhelmingly has resonated with Americans, they blame the liberal order and rock for "coarsening" our culture...

...DANIEL G. MINTZ North Bethesda, MD LONG LIVE ROCK DANIEL WATTENBERG'S lengthy review of Nadine Cohodas's Spinning Blues Into Gold (Sept...

...Greiner also says I failed to report her views on opening adoption records...

...I think the answer is clear...

...The Weekly Standard has helped...

...unfortunately, because of Bush's seeming inarticulateness, which is perceived by many as a lack of understanding about the issues, he is having a real problem drawing distinctions between his positions and Gore's...

...Perhaps some of the tears that day were from evangelicals who were as sad as I was with what I saw...

...area and fancies neither Bill Clinton nor Bill Hybels very much, I have long wondered how these two bedfellows really share the covers...

...CARL F. HOROWITZ Ashburn, VA A BASTARDIZED INTERVIEW...

...MARLEY ELIZABETH GREINER Executive Chair, Bastard Nation Columbus, OH IRA CARNAHAN RESPONDS: Greiner says I used "old, out-of-context quotes...

...Third, Bush must go on the offensive on all fronts, following the advice of a famous Navy admiral: "Damn the torpedoes, go ahead...

...First, when Kristol compares Congress to the presidency, he should remember that congressional elections are very localized events...

...Bush to link Al Gore to Bill Clinton once again ("Relinking Gore to Clinton," Sept...

...The Chicago Tribune reported that at the end of the Hybels-Clinton event, Hybels "put his arm on the president's shoulder and prayed: 'Thank you, God, that you wired him up the way you did.'" In the evangelical culture of celebrity, when one celebrity (Hybels) thanks another celebrity (God) in front of several thousand pastors for the gift of another celebrity (Clinton), it turns him into an evangelical hero and mod-el—his repentance (real or not) making irrelevant his appalling record on social issues and the sickening moral example he set...

...Lieberman prior to August and Sen...

...Instead of recounting my views on the right of adopted adults to access their own public records, Carna-han lifted old, out-of-context quotes from alt.adoption, an Internet newsgroup known for its bombast, bluster, and hyperbole, to characterize me as some sort of disturbed mother-hater out to overthrow the American way of life...

...It conveyed a real feel for why rock 'n' roll happened—and deserved to...

...A strategy that focused more consistently on the fact that Gore is a throwback to policies that Clinton, the Republican party, and the American people have long ago discarded, that his instinctive reliance on purely governmental solutions to problems is a mistake, and that his extreme positions in the recent past bring into question what he would really do if elected, would be a far more fruitful approach to the remaining weeks of the campaign...

...It will be difficult to convince the average voter that George Bush, unlike every single other politician they can think of, is sufficiently more moral than Gore that they should choose between the two based on morality...

...DAVID GERSTMAN Baltimore, MD FRED BARNES SUGGESTS that a key strategy of the Bush campaign should be to relink Gore to Clinton, since many swing voters would like to continue Clinton's policies without Clinton's morality...

...Nothing subliminal about that, but it would remind the voters that there is (or was) a difference between the two men running on the Democratic ticket...

...14), and I have been laughing ever since...

...The downside, of course, is that it weakens the tie between Gore's shaky morality and Clinton's abhorrent behavior...

...As I watched part of the C-SPAN tape of the Willow Creek meeting I soon realized that I was watching a Chicago slow pitch softball game...

...Hopefully, the review will steer WEEKLY STANDARD readers to classic powerhouse books on rock's blues, R&B, and country roots, like Peter Guralnick's Lost Highway, Arnold Shaw's Honkers and Shouters, and Charlie Gillett's The Sound of the City...

...For the record, I'm a registered Republican...

...First, they can tie Gore closer to Clinton, to remind voters that they don't like Clinton personally and thus should not like Gore...

...My mother worked for Wendell Wilkie...

...Greiner was denouncing mothers as "breeders" and signing her Internet postings "by all means necessary" at the very time I was writing the article...

...11) rightly suggests that it was Willow Creek Community Church's type of Christianity that made it easy for Clinton to seduce the 5,000 pastors gathered there in August...

...I'll leave it up to readers to fill in the last names...

...Governor Bush must clearly articulate his position on a host of issues being debated, but he can't assume that simply by labeling Gore a liberal, or even a leftist, the voters will understand where he stands, or what he would do regarding a specific issue...

...Many of the rank and file still loathe Clinton, but there is a discernible impulse among certain evangelical leaders to distance themselves from the so-called fundamentalist right on issues like abortion, homosexuality, and other culture-war hot buttons...

...GARY CASTEEL Jefferson City, TN THE TIES THAT BIND FRED BARNES IS RIGHT when he urges Gov...

...Nothing I saw that day rang true...

...JAMES M. KUSHINER Chicago, IL KUDOS TO ANDREW FERGUSON for his keen insights into how the spinmeister from 1600 Pennsylvania played the kid from Willow Creek like a drum—or maybe it was the other way around...

...While I almost always agree with Barnes's arguments, this time I find them misdirected...

...DELICIOUSLY FUNNY THE LAST FEW YEARS have, politically speaking, been a bit disorienting to fact as well as opinion...

...Once Lieberman must defend his about face on significant issues, he can no longer defend his boss...

...In fact, I reported at length the views and statements of Bastard Nation, which Greiner founded and now leads...

...DAVID W MELTZER Dallas, TX...

...11) was terrific because it was about more than just the Chess brothers...

...Adoptees aren't a state secret, and adoption isn't a ticket into the Witness Protection Program...

...Airline troubles kept me away and I should thank them...

...The loss is theirs, not ours...

...to say that of the two candidates, only one, Bush, is likely to continue the same economic results...

...As long as the Bush campaign fails to draw a distinction between Sen...

...And Bill didn't mind being used because he thought he was actually using Bill at the same time...

...or those like Bastard Nation and me, who believe in equal treatment under the law and the right to own our public records just like the non-adopted...

...Regarding the Clinton-Gore relationship, the campaign has two fundamental choices...

...As an evangelical who lives in the D.C...

...While they may still oppose abortion, they don't like to get too excited about it and would rather be seen working with liberals and "moderates" than be associated with evangelicals such as Jerry Fal-well...