Correspondence
Correspondence SADDAM CORLEONE DAVID BROOKS'S "SADDAM'S BRAIN" (Nov. 11) is absolutely brilliant. It singlehandedly changed my estimate of both Saddam Hussein and THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Brooks is...
...Without this, Saddam is just a Mafia chieftain out of his depth in running a country...
...The distinction is crucial because a large part of Wellstone's appeal to academics and other leftists was that he had figured out a way to win electorally and thus actually exercise political power, rather than grade blue book exams...
...He flags the real focus of the conspiracy underpinning the aroused Islamic world: The infidels in "Kill the Infidel...
...They can barely empower themselves in faculty meetings, let alone in the halls of the United States Senate...
...As for Rick Kahn, nobody knew what he was going to say until he said it—the family only told him to "speak his heart...
...Yes, I heard him solicit the support of the Republicans in attendance, but it struck me as just plain goofy, even bizarre, but certainly not "Maoist...
...As Todd Gitlin remarked a few years ago, "The Left took over the English Department, and the Right took over the White House...
...are Christians and Jews and, by extension, Western civilization as we know it...
...11) earns my gratitude...
...Thank you, David Brooks, for the first article on Iraq that I found to be genuinely informative...
...At the risk of stating the obvious, Wellstone's constituency was not academic leftists, but rather, the voters of Minnesota, who elected him twice to office...
...Hitler's Pan-Germanic mysticism and its obsession with the magical power of the "blood" is unintelligible to Americans but would be immediately clear to Baathists...
...I work in the labor movement and know this to be true...
...Radical Islam detects and exploits the Christian West's fault lines, the worst of which is pervasive and systematic anti-Semitism...
...Paul Wellstone, who thrived on the democratic rough and tumble of contested politics, would have probably found it richly ironic that one of his most fervent supporters asked others to give up their worldview in order to support his—but that's just the point...
...FRED ROSS Middletown, OH...
...It was ironic, but hardly sinister...
...BOB MEYER Kirkland, WA LETTER FROM THE LEFT SPEAKING AS SOMEONE WHO might be labeled a "Wellstone Democrat," let me say at the outset that I greatly admire Christopher Caldwell's many provocative and thoughtful essays in The Weekly Standard and elsewhere...
...However, I think he missed the mark in his analysis of both Wellstone's constituency and his memorial service ("Mourning in America," Nov...
...RICHARD YESELSON Washington, DC KILLING CHRISTIANS AMITAI ETZIONI in "Killing Christians" (Nov...
...I'm always baffled as to why conservatives do not seem happier than they do about the position assigned to them in this power swap...
...But leaving aside the fact that the boos seemed to come from a minority of those present, please remember that there were 20,000 people at the memorial...
...It obviously was not the intention, nor could it have been, of the Minnesota Democratic party to encourage or sanction those boos...
...As for the memorial, yes, of course, it was tasteless to boo some of the Republicans who attended...
...Brooks is right: To understand Saddam you have to understand his thinking, in particular, the philosophical ideas that motivate him...
...Wellstone could, and that's one reason he is quite literally irreplaceable to the Left...
...Additionally, the countless rank and file of labor unions and their leaders who worked with and admired Wellstone would, by themselves, swell the ranks of his supporters far beyond the literature departments of the Ivy League...
...Its atmosphere was, therefore, more like a ballgame than a funeral precisely because Wellstone was one of the few politicians of either party who elicited genuine passion and devotion from his constituents...
...The assault on Israel, as Etzioni states, gets them attention, and obscures the real danger the West faces...
...Academics, and perhaps conservative intellectuals, like the lefty scholars themselves, commit the fallacy of assuming that universities are more influential than they are...
...It may be that these Islamic radicals, who are moving relentlessly into Europe and America, stimulate historical hatreds, and thus find willing executioners in the media to further their purposes...
...This intellectual Left either does not grasp or simply refuses to admit that the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis is merely a sideshow and a precursor of the holocaust in planning...
...The comparisons to Nazism are also particularly important, because Americans have never understood the appeal of Hitler to the German people...
...The intellectual Left in our academic world, abundantly quoted and abetted by much of the American media with the broadest general reach, helps to spin the yarn of Islamic victimhood and Western guilt...
Vol. 8 • November 2002 • No. 11
