Correspondence
Correspondence Pain in the Daschle AS USUAL, Fred Barnes provides an outstanding analysis of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's strategy to thwart President Bush's domestic agenda ("The Majority...
...For that, the agency trusted needs to be reliable, which gets us back to the use of evidence, science, and other rational procedures...
...Perhaps Bush's detractors believe they can convince voters that politics "stops at the water's edge," that he has performed with near-genius in the war, but will magically become a twit once more when the focus returns to the domestic agenda...
...Epstein says he passed "an older man wearing a Cubs hat...
...Commission on Civil Rights has obviously long been a farce, a sham, and a personal tool and stage for Mary Frances Berry's racist views ("Berry Bad Behavior," Dec...
...For eight years Republicans did everything they could to destroy the clinton presidency...
...But all Republicans are "true-blue" patriots and everything they were doing was in the interest of the American people, right...
...Democrats for all their incoherence have one thing up on the Republicans: They simply can't adopt that "herd" mentality very well...
...Using such language is not just a cheap and ridiculous rhetorical tactic: It trivializes real terrorism, and it insults the victims of terrorism...
...I must, however, point out a small misuse of language in his recent essay, "A Walker Outside the City" (Dec...
...MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM Annapolis, MD RUNAWAY TRAIN STEPHEN MOORE'S "Scamtrak" (Dec.24) presented many worthwhile reasons for ending Amtrak's fiscal inefficiency, but the alternatives to bailout Moore suggests have no basis in fact...
...Would a privately run passenger rail service provide some private sector operator a means to profit underwritten by freight railroads...
...This is definitely not a fairy story to take your children to...
...subverting the efforts of a popularly elected president not only distracted congress during that period, but hampered the functioning of the executive branch as well...
...CHARLES LANDESMAN Professor Emeritus Hunter College and CUNY Graduate School New York, NY WHIPPING BOY I ENJOY THE WEEKLY STANDARD, but I wanted to point out an error in the Dec...
...No detail has been overlooked in bringing the spirit of the book to the movie...
...It is fine to say that President Bush is doing a good job executing the war...
...Hopefully we'll soon see the end of Berry's rule, and the commission if it continues to exist will be legitimized by her removal...
...Tolkien's astonishing literary accomplishment of turning a childlike story about a hobbit and a dragon into an epic of our age has confused the literary critics who only perceive that Tolkien's masterpiece is not modernist, and who think it is too literal and too moral to be taken seriously...
...So if Daschle is giving Bush a sour stomach, well, he's the opposition party and he's supposed to do that...
...24 issue...
...One must wonder whether Democrats are seriously overplaying their hand...
...This is unlikely to happen, and Amtrak will never turn the corner on its own...
...24), Thomas Hibbs praises the "tilting of the balance away from doubt and back to trust...
...He continues, "Under this plan, the government would still own and maintain the tracks and the rest of the physical infrastructure . . ." Except for much, but not all, of the northeast corridor and a few other locations, Amtrak (the government) does not own any tracks...
...Now we have Senator Daschle's obstructionism...
...The president's high approval and popularity ratings show that his powerful leadership and masterful decision-making during the war on terror have dispelled the public's doubts about his intellectual and managerial capabilities...
...31/Jan...
...Although the military law code is not without fault, it is a far cry from being the grim "bane of civil libertarians" Tell describes...
...Throughout the article, Tell uses language (in jest, it appears) comparing Berry to al Qaeda terrorists...
...But let me assure Weekly Standard readers that Alvin Plantinga is amiable and jocular, personality traits displayed in his writings as well as in his person...
...The Navy has had our own share of such incidents and does not need to take credit for those of our Air Force colleagues...
...CHRISTOPHER M. SCHNAUBELT Santa Maria, CA SO SENATOR TOM DASCHLE is a highly partisan Democrat...
...I can reassure him, however, that very little is lost from the book to the movie, except for the compression required by a movie treatment...
...However, people place their trust in a variety of agencies and authorities...
...The man wasn't wearing a Cubs hat...
...In any case, should J. Bottum see Fellowship of the Ring, he will not be disappointed...
...Regardless of one's opinion of Berry and her leadership of the commission, she is obviously not a terrorist...
...STEVE NAIDAMAST Washington, DC SOMETHING ABOUT MARY WAY TO TELL IT, DAVID TELL...
...Incidentally, the picture of Alvin Plantinga that accompanied Hibbs's review shows a man who is stern and censorious...
...I know something about courts-martial, having served for more than 15 years as an Air Force judge advocate...
...EMLEN SMITH New York, NY HAT HEAD I APPRECIATE Joseph Epstein's essays that turn up in The Weekly Standard...
...KEN PRUITT Lawrenceville, GA I AM REPULSED by David Tell's editorial "Berry Bad Behavior...
...Correspondence Pain in the Daschle AS USUAL, Fred Barnes provides an outstanding analysis of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's strategy to thwart President Bush's domestic agenda ("The Majority Leader's War," Dec...
...ROBERT MAGUIRE USN Commanding Officer Bad Aibling, Germany...
...JOHN FITZGERALD Chicago, IL A FEW GOOD RULES ALTHOUGH I CONCUR with David Tell's defense of the president's order regarding military commissions, I strongly disagree with his condemnation of the extant military justice system ("Tribunals on Trial," Dec...
...A hat is a constructed article (e.g., a fedora or bowler), usually made of felt and steamed, pressed, and formed on a block to shape it...
...No doubt there are egregious exceptions to the norm, but Tell discredits not only the myriad judges and military members who have honestly and faithfully served as court members without regard to any repercussions their verdicts may have on their own professional lives, but also most of the commanders who convene those courts-martial...
...Daschle's stating that Democrats believe that "While George Bush is popular, voter doubts are close to the surface" is particularly revealing...
...Break up the Amtrak system into discrete, independently operated lines," Moore writes...
...the Republicans helped him right along...
...JOHN CAIAZZA Nashua, NH A VERY KERMIT CHRISTMAS SPEAKING OF Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, J. Bottum writes, "You don't get much of that narrator's voice in the films we've all seen," and he mentions three ("The Ghost of Christmas Past," Dec...
...The "thickness" Bottum fears will be lost is there in the characterizations of the separate races: The elves are elfish and the dwarves dwarfish in the Tolkien sense...
...But then, the critics of their day thought Shakespeare and Dickens were too popular and their literary virtues too obvious to be worthy of serious consideration...
...trust by itself never provides a basis for thinking that something is true...
...What are needed are railroad operators to run the railroad...
...A baseball cap is a soft, unconstructed article stitched together from several pieces, with a visor added...
...The staff of Saruman the wizard is even a highly finished machine product while Gandolf's is made of gnarled wood...
...Politicians have a corner on that corner...
...Fred Barnes had me rolling...
...Railroads own them...
...I would recommend that Bottum, if he would consider such a humble candidate, take a look at The Muppet Christmas Carol, made in 1992...
...But please remember it wasn't just President clinton who made us unprepared to deal with the tragedy of Sept...
...The U.S...
...In the opening paragraph of his rant, he lauds the Bush administration for its "decision to forgo a military tribunal in favor of regular federal district court proceedings against Mary Frances Berry," and later he refers to the U.S...
...Republicans deserve a dose of their own medicine...
...Democrats were moderately successful in spinning doubts about Bush to voters during the 2000 presidential campaign, falsely portraying him as a mediocre boob propelled to success only through his father's political connections...
...I am confident that honest reporting about military commissions, why they are both legitimate and necessary, and the distinction between them and courts-martial will ensure that neither is besmirched...
...Tell apparently finds it appropriate to label anyone with whom he disagrees a terrorist...
...Such persons would know how to maximize Amtrak's efficiency and, importantly, rid the railroad of political interference...
...Commission on Civil Rights as a "radical cell...
...The sadness that characterizes the book, the elegiac tone and sense of inevitable diminishment is strongly played in this movie version...
...In "Behind Hollywood's Lines" by Stephen Schwartz, Scott O'Grady is called a Navy lieutenant, but he was an Air Force captain...
...JOHN F. O'CONNOR Berlin, NJ RING IN THE NEW YEAR LIKE J. BOTTUM, I too was wary of seeing the new film Fellowship of the Ring, the third attempt to make a film version of J.R.R...
...Therefore the tilting back towards trust alone accomplishes nothing...
...He was wearing a Cubs cap...
...JACQUELINE EDWARDS New York, NY TRUST IN THE BALANCE IN HIS REVIEW of the books by Plantinga and Wolterstorff on the revival of Christian philosophy ("Calvin and Hobbes," Dec...
...It preserves, I think, as much of Dickens's wry, twinkle-eyed voice as can be expected...
...It might then be able to do some worthwhile work on the subject of racial tension, which so many black racists have been determined to prolong and worsen, at everyone's expense...
...Tolkien's Lord of the Rings ("Tolkien, the Book," Dec...
Vol. 7 • January 2002 • No. 17
