Correspondence
Correspondence CHEAP CHICKEN HAWKS IN "CHEAP HAWKS CAN'T FLY" (Nov. 4), Frederick W. Kagan makes several good points. Any administration's time in office is relatively brief, even one that lasts...
...Nothing new about this...
...This might sound like an impossible figure...
...RILEY Wauwatosa, WI THOUGH A PEERLESS TEACHER of ancient political thought, Leo Strauss had three conspicuous shortcomings that Werner J. Dannhauser fails to take into account in "Faith and Reason": a vast overestimation of Heidegger, an undue preoccupation with so-called esoteric writing, and, most important, an unwillingness to acknowledge the primacy of faith...
...We need to kill him politically...
...ALAN HOBDEN Florissant, CO...
...Although he had been scarcely speaking above a whisper, though he had been struggling for breath, though he had hardly been able to raise his hand to take mine, he lifted himself up to make a great sign of the Cross and, in sonorous Latin, pronounced the blessing of the Church over me...
...The Bush administration has tried to buy security on the cheap...
...The only answer, as Kagan points out, is to ante up the money to pay for both...
...The only regret he voiced to me was, "There's so much left to be done...
...One of these is the Stryker medium-weight combat brigade that will be as rapidly deployable as light infantry but with the mobility and punch of an armored/mechanized force...
...As Kagan rightly points out, it failed to adequately fund national defense...
...Yet, the Department of Defense is reported to be seriously considering reductions or delays in new and advanced weapons systems that could mean the difference between victory and defeat in the wars of this decade...
...Evolution into a more advanced species doesn't seem to work when it comes to the media...
...Consequently, the focus of United States defense planning shifted away from the former standard, that of fighting and winning two nearly simultaneous wars in widely separate geographic theaters...
...When I responded that he had left a corps of devoted students who would carry on his work, he smiled and asked, "Do you think so...
...The Department of Defense proclaimed a strategy of transformation that amounts to promising to buy future technology tomorrow while saving money today by cutting back on the modernization...
...As a young teenager I remember, in 1963, the fathers and grandfathers of today's press people trying to do the same thing with Lee Harvey Oswald...
...In order to meet both current challenges and future force requirements the defense budget will have to be raised substantially...
...An administration that campaigned on the slogan "help is on the way" finds itself in a militarily more precarious position than did its predecessor precisely because it failed to provide the required help...
...Unfortunately, the term originated not from the right as a note of shame but from the left as a cry of triumph over its success in defeating Bork's nomination...
...Now it just so happens that Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante did believe in (indeed, demonstrated) the reconcilability of Hellenic and Hebraic thought and, therefore, the harmony of faith and reason, and ultimately, the singularity of truth...
...Another is the V-22 Osprey, central to the Marine Corps's ability to conduct maneuver warfare against inland targets...
...And so it is to those contemporary thinkers who, in sharing this conviction, understand and stress its centrali-ty—Maritain, Gilson, Garrigou-Lagrange, and Pieper, to name just a few—that we must turn as our indispensable guides to medieval thought...
...The SCRAPBOOK (Nov...
...It first appeared on July 5, 1991, as an off-the-cuff remark by the radical feminist lawyer Flo Kennedy, who—at an anti-Clarence Thomas press conference with leaders of the National Organization for Women—declared: "We're going to Bork him...
...Thus, though Dannhauser would like to persuade us that through his focus on Christian medieval thinkers, Fr...
...4), with a contrast between "the genuine man of faith and the genuine man of reason...
...area...
...Kagan mentions several systems at risk such as the F/A-22 and the Comanche helicopter, but there are many more...
...The military needs forces that are more readily deployable with longer reach and improved lethality...
...ERIC FETTMANN New York, NY LET'S DO THE TIME WARP IT'S 1963 ALL OVER AGAIN (and 1964 and 1980 and on and on...
...Any administration's time in office is relatively brief, even one that lasts two terms, so the opportunities to see their decisions come back to haunt them are relatively rare...
...Fortin showed himself to be no mere "follower of Strauss," his adoption of the irreconcilable Straussian "tension" between Athens and Jerusalem (read: contradiction between faith and reason) would require that, whatever his merits, he be considered something less than "our indispensable guide to this vast period of western history...
...DANIEL GOURE The Lexington Institute Arlington, VA ERNEST FORTIN, RIP WERNER J. DANNHAUSER mars his fine tribute to Ernest Fortin, "Faith and Reason" (Nov...
...NOW leaders at the press conference, including Gloria Steinem, Liz Holtzman, and Patricia Ireland, all chortled with glee at Kennedy's "witticism...
...In the immediate aftermath of September 11, the Department of Defense, under the leadership of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, published an assessment of the nation's military posture, the Quadrennial Defense Review or QDR...
...Facing the very real possibility of two wars at the same time with an unknowable number of threats that may follow, it makes no sense to shortchange the military today in order to buy better equipment sometime in the future...
...Hence he does little justice to Father Fortin to call him a "man of faith," as if for that he were less a "man of reason...
...It just had to be the vile right wing that killed their sainted President Kennedy...
...Exactly a year later, with war with Iraq looming and North Korea acknowledging that it has an illegal nuclear weapons program, the United States is facing precisely that threat of two wars...
...such a circumstance now confronts the Bush administration...
...Kagan says that defense spending needs to be increased by $100 billion annually...
...However, as the author of a study on the subject of defense budgeting, I can confirm that Kagan is right...
...Senate treated Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork "so badly a new verb—to bork— was coined for the unfair trashing of a nominee" ("A Choice, Not an Echo," Nov...
...Even though this screwed-up man was an avowed Marxist and fan of Fidel Castro and had tried to settle in Communist Russia, the media did their best to smear Dallas and Texas and Barry Goldwater and Republicans and even protesters at an earlier anti-Adlai Stevenson rally...
...Imagine what such a force could do if deployed behind Iraqi front lines...
...It just has to be the vile right wing that killed 10 innocent people in the D.C...
...Kagan rightly stresses the irony of this situation...
...The central focus of this report was the need to concentrate on new threats...
...As Strauss himself demanded, this title of "indispensable guide" could only be given to one who understood these thinkers as they understood themselves...
...unfortunately his ambivalent religiosity was transmitted to many of his students...
...4) laments the media's desperate attempts to link John Muhammad (or John Williams, if you're NPR) to the right wing, to the gun lobby, and to anything but Islam...
...PATRICK G.D...
...CRAIG S. MAXWELL La Mesa, CA BORK, BORK, BORK FRED BARNES IS NOT QUITE RIGHT when he writes that the U.S...
...Either of these could make the difference between success and failure in the next conflict...
...Fortin's defense of the Church's early doctrinal definitions, his strictures on the trendiness and sketchy theological education of some fellow faculty, show him to be a man devoted to reason, yes, but also a man devoted to his faith...
...I visited Ernest just three days before his edifying Christian death, which Dannhauser beautifully describes...
Vol. 8 • November 2002 • No. 10
