Charles R. Anderson

Reading the above essay by James Kilbourne reminded me that he had written some essays available in the archives of Rebirth of Reason. I had read a couple and enjoyed them. I went back to look them over and found that I had read only a few of them. I want to recommend that those not familiar with these essays should take a look at them. In particular, I really like the essay Free to Live Life. James ends his first paragraph with: James discusses the effects of Capitalism on the freedom to choose where to live, the choice of work, freedom of association, ability to pursue better physical health, the use and availability of leisure time, and the freedom to develop intellectually. His discussion clarifies many of the ways Capitalism provides the freedom to explore and develop our own individuality, the humanity of our self. Such an essay can only be written by a man who has deeply and realistically read and evaluated history. History among young Americans is highly underrated in importance. Without great knowledge of it, they are stripped relatively bare by the claims of the communitarians and socialists. Is this why our schools never do history justice anymore?

Barbara, I agree that the situations are very likely similar. I did not mean to imply that Anna and my daughters did what they did in full understanding that it was wrong. What had bothered me was that they were only willing to really think about the implications of what they had done after they knew that they had hurt me. They had already known that I was upset, but as long as that feeling was discussed analytically in terms of how people should act, they would not focus on the issue or even recognize that it might have hurt me. Only when I said that I was hurt and abandoned a rational argument as simply ineffective, at least at that time, were they willing to focus on what the effect of their actions was on me. They then became more understanding of what had happened and they were sorry it had. One of the many irritating events of that day was a discussion between Kirsten and me of Affirmative Action. Early in the discussion or not long before, Kirsten had said with some exasperation that I was always right in our discussions. I responded that I thought that was unlikely in fact and that I did not wish her to accept my views simply because they were mine. But when you disagree with me, just give me rational reasons for disagreeing so we can both benefit from the discussion. Kirsten replied that, no Dad, I really meant that you really are always right. Then we really got into our discussion on Affirmative Action. Kirsten coming out of the very socialist Montgomery County schools of MD and having 4 years at the U. of Texas, knew that I was wrong to oppose AA because everyone agreed that it was essential. I argued that it was in principle discriminatory on the basis of race and that was the very evil it was supposed to combat. I argued that it was clearly unconstitutional, that it brought people to doubt the validity of the achievements of those minority people who attained professional positions and honors, and that it lowered the bar of expectations for many minority members. It also often put minority members into positions in which they did not have the ability to succeed, which only fed their and others doubts about their ability to achieve. Kirsten tried some counterarguments, but I think she recognized that they were not sufficient. She then angrily called me a racist. I am sure that I am not a racist, but it sure hurt to have someone I love call me one. It also made me angry. Kirsten now understands that she was wrong to do this, but that admission came well after the event. When I was in the 8th and 9th grade, there was a boy who lived across the street and was a year older than me. We both liked basketball, but I had mostly played baseball before that and basketball was a bit new for me. He was taller and a better player than I was. At first, he was much better. I worked really hard at the game and by the end of the 9th grade, I could really push him hard in a game, but he still always won. I remember how frustrating that could be and I am sure that Kirsten feels that kind of frustration in our discussions when she has taken a different view from mine. But, we have to learn to deal with such things. There is a great benefit in the emotional attachments and the loyalties that people do form for the people they love and admire. People make mistakes. Sometimes they just get caught up in their own emotional battles or their own affairs and they do not think what they say through. It surely is a good check that when we have hurt someone we love that we should step back and refocus our minds on how we might have done that. Our love for our family and friends and our respect for others generally is built piece by piece over periods of time and based on many interactions. Love and respect for the people who have earned it then serves to protect us from temporary mistakes and from thoughtless acts by reminding us to look at the complete context of our relationships and our mutual respect. As with my family and with Barbara's friend, this can focus attention and it can let us see an event in its true size, which may be much less a crisis than it seemed at the time. Whenever you are upset with someone you love or respect it is important to constantly keep reminding yourself of the larger context. It does wonders for temper management, among other things. Viewed this way, loyalty is a virtue. I am delighted that you have found this discussion Paul and I got into worth following. It helps to disspell my concern that I have been indulging myself greatly. I admit to a hunger to have wise and thinking people to talk to about relationships and the nature of people in a sufficiently trusting atmosphere that we can talk about things that we find important in our own lives. In the world at large, people seem to hold the things most important to them very close to the vest. There is a great fear of sharing these things. Perhaps some of it is because of the discrepancy in what is often important to people and what their ethics says should be important. But, I think much of it is simply that people feel too vulnerable to disapproval. There really is not enough good will around. One of the biggest functions that churches seem to provide is a supposed group of people of good will. It does not entirely work this way, but they are a step in that direction and people want and need this. Because Objectivists stand a bit apart from most people philosophically, they find it even harder to talk about the things that matter the most to themselves personally. Sure, Affirmative Action, tax cuts, limited government, and the many other things we can easily discuss among ourselves are important, but our family and our friends are important also. Perhaps it is also important to talk about our desire to supplement our work with hobbies or thoughts of writing a novel. We ought to be able to talk with other Objectivists about this in a context of good will, rather than one in which people seek to score points with constant criticism. There is a need for communities of Objectivists who share some loyalty born of respect and affection grown over time in their interactions. We seem to have a great start here at OL in that direction. I also hope your cat soon feels better.

Paul, You have made a great number of interesting observations. This being Mother's Day, I have a call to make to my mother in Tulsa, OK and I want to spend some hours at home with Anna, the mother of my 3 daughters, in thanks for the incredible gift she gave me by giving them to me. This note will be short, but I will write more later. I think you are right in seeing some similarities in how I saw Atlas Shrugged and how Shauna saw it. I felt a huge emotional tug from it, but at every step of the way, I was very analytical in reading also. I did not read it in a great hurry. I devoured it, but at a slow pace as I thought about everything. I felt that the very strong emotional response had to be tethered so I could think the ideas through carefully. Mind you, the experience was fantastic on every level, intellectually and emotionally. I stored many ideas for later more thorough and extensive evaluation as well. When I finished, there was much that re-inforced ideas I had already held, I was convinced of some other ideas, and I had a number of things that I thought simply needed more evalution. I then started reading the non-fiction that was then available and subscribed to the Objectivist Newsletter and got the back issues. I read them really carefully and analyzed that material. Only then was I convinced that I was an Objectivist, in the sense that this philosophy would serve as a central and essential framework for the further development of my understanding of the world. I also recognized that it was just an important part of that framework and that it needed extensive supplementation. I thought I was really lucky to have found this great core to work from. But I never thought that the responsibility for my philosophy of life was anyone's but my own. I could benefit from Ayn Rand's great gift, but if she was wrong about something, it was my responsibility to recognize it and correct the error. Those many issues that she had not addressed were my responsibilty to address as I could. One of the things I was aware of was that there was a great deal about heroes that she never developed. For instance, there was little about their families and the effect of their families on most of them. There was little about their childhood development. There was rather little on their non-work personalities. There was also little on friendships. I did not hold it against Ayn Rand that she did not get into these topics much. I was just grateful that she had done so much. I had read The Fountainhead in late winter over about 3 days, some of those days staying up until dawn. I did not read it particularly fast either. There was a lot to think about. Then I took on reading Atlas Shrugged in the Spring. That summer, I worked for an oil pipeline company and read the non-fiction in the evenings. In August 1965, I allowed myself to say that I was an Objectivist. At Brown, I was immediately beset by hordes of socialist Freshmen who had heard about my unusual views. It was very interesting to refine many of my ideas in these bull sessions. I really went through fire that year, both due to the many hours in bull sessions and because I was a relatively unprepared physics major. My high school physics course was unbelievably bad. Because of these sessions, I developed a reputation and soon heard about another freshman in another dorm who had similar ideas. Larry Bellows, an Applied Math major, was the guy. Then a couple more months down the road, Larry brought Roger Donway over and we met. Roger was a freshman philosophy major. Other than us three, there were some religious guys and hordes of socialists and adamant mixed economy types, until Roger met David Kelley two years later when he was a freshman philosophy major. The four of us had many very good discussions on our own. To this day, I think they are all great people and the best part of my experience at Brown. I have to break off for now. Thanks for all the thought you put into your two responses. I am looking forward to thinking more about them.

Then we share the silver hair, such as there is. His good humor, optimism, benevolence, and love of the good all greatly appealed to me and influenced me forever. At that age, my father and Hopalong were probably my greatest influences. From the 7th through the 10th grades, the Rev. Gordon Stenning joined them. He was a very good man, whose religion was so much more rational than Christianity is generally that he greatly delayed my understanding of the problems of religion. He did provide a very good role model of what a man should be, however. They remain among my greatest heroes. It is a good thing to have heroes you admire in history and to have several you have known in life.

How could I have forgotten Hoppy? Hopalong Cassidy was my great cowboy hero when I was 5 and 6. Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger were OK, but nothing like Hoppy.

Paul, Anna and I spent quite a bit of time together last weekend, though much of it was doing yard work and buying plants for the garden. She has been working many weekends lately as a pharmacist. This weekend she is working again, so it was good to have some time with her last weekend. But since I spent that time at home, I paid for it by coming into the lab and working until dawn. I still am on the crazy working until dawn schedule. I expect to break it tonight. Being an experimental scientist, I get a bit uncomfortable when I go too long a stretch without referencing what I am thinking to something observable and known in reality. In keeping with this, the complexity of any thinking human being, and my conviction that most of what anyone really knows about being human comes from introspection, I have a tendency (very likely a very irritating tendency for some people) to try to reference my thoughts on human nature or psychology to someone I know. That is me, so it looks like it is really all about me. Some must think it me wanting to be the center of attention. It may be in part! But I will assure everyone that I really wish to invite other people to give me more of a glimpse into their souls by telling me the equivalent kind of things about themselves. Paul knows much more about Paul than he knows about anyone else and it would be fascinating to me if he told me what makes him tick more. What in his childhood experiences seems to have had an important effect upon his sense of life and how he views himself and others. Similarly, there are many other people here who are very interesting people. I would really like to learn more about human nature from the viewpoint of some of its finer examples! There are clearly many very troubled people, but I confess to being more interested in relatively healthy and happy people. I find the long discussions of troubled people that one tends to encounter in the many psychology books depressing and somewhat less than highly relevant to understanding most of the people I encounter professionally and whom I would enjoy as friends. For instance, I have observed that most of the people who are Democrats are much less likely to give money voluntarily to charities than are Republicans. They think that most people are like them and therefore government is necessary to care for people because private charities will never have any significant money for the poor. Republicans are less likely to see the need for government charity since they think people will, like themselves, support private charity. I could state many more examples of people assuming that others all share the traits they see in themselves. I think many psychologists enter that field because they have very significant problems they want to understand. The people I know who have been most interested in this subject generally fit this profile. I do not maintain that they must and I expect there are numerous exceptions, but if most psychologists are troubled and they are working with people who are troubled, then their view of human nature will be skewed by these factors toward one with a higher concentration of troubles and unhappiness than generally exists. I have some concerns about the more theoretical and even the more concrete conclusions they may draw as a result. So, I would like to learn more about how others see themselves, on which topic I suspect many more people are knowledgeable than they are about the character of other people. Of course, when dumping too much information about myself, I risk looking like I just want to be the center of attention. I also divulge that I am not 6'4". In fact, I was only 138 lbs. upon graduating from high school and was only 5'7.5" tall. I had broad shoulders and was generally strong for my size. I had great endurance, but I was too slow for the varsity teams of a fairly large and very sports-minded high school. But, I enjoyed the sandlot games of tackle football, basketball, and baseball a great deal. I think the many hours of sports, while time away from books, was nonetheless good for me in terms of giving me the assurance that I could do most anything that I set my mind too. I could lose and get up and start all over again. Usually, I won if it was football or baseball, but the important thing was to have the confidence in myself to jump back into the competition. Basketball was a bit tougher, but I was pretty combative in that and my endurance was always useful. I think playing sports is a good thing. It helps in some ways to integrate your mind and body. It is useful to have confidence in both in this world. The two of my daughters who played sports definitely benefited from it. Your discussion of what you felt about Brokeback Mountain was certainly interesting. For my part, I do not have any revulsion reaction to the thought of any two decent people making love to one another. I understand that mine is a very unusual reaction to homosexuality and bisexuality, but it is difficult for me to understand the feelings that most people have on this issue as an example. This is actually a fascinating difference, since I have all kinds of testosterone coursing through my veins. What makes this difference? Am I just more open-minded or are there other biochemical differences in people that really matter here? I do not know, but I do have some observations that suggest that there are other biochemical factors that play a role, though I do not know the scientific details. This is why I have wondered why so many guys are compelled to make every effort to have sex with undesireable females as teenagers and I had no such feelings. Actually, it was worse, the girls they often wanted were repulsive to me. To attract me, a girl had to be intelligent, nice, spirited, and have some interesting ideas. Such girls were very rare, as such women are still quite rare.

Jenna, I agree that Objectivism is not a cult. It is amazing that some would try to make it one. There is an interesting passage in Barbara Branden's The Passion of Ayn Rand, This is Ayn Rand in her notes for Atlas Shrugged. How can anyone claiim to have read and understood Atlas Shrugged and think they are an Objectivist without benefit of making independent rational judgments? It is such a cop-out to go to the "Official" source on Objectivism for one's viewpoint.

Phil, I understand. The joke is that we never have any copious free time, especially if we are actually trying to live as an Objectivist.

James, It may be slightly redeeming that I love taking Anna to an opera. She enjoys it so much that it gives me great pleasure to see her enjoy it. I also enjoy the opera directly, but I am inclined to prefer classical instrumental music or vocal music in English for listening purposes. I need the visual aspect of the opera for it to reach its greater glory, especially since I am severely challenged in understanding other languages. My favorite American history has for a long time been centered on the American Revolution, the years leading to it, and the years following in which we established our form of government and our Constitution. George Washington was clearly an incredibly great man. Today, he is awfully and very unjustly underestimated. Without his effort, we would not have achieved our freedom from Britain. Without his effort, we very likely would have failed much sooner in realizing the limited government we maintained for quite a while. By the way, I also think it is disgraceful that the work of Nathaniel Greene and Gouverneur Morris and many others is also not appreciated. I greatly enjoyed the David McCullough John Adams. On the war itself, I really enjoyed the old 2 volume work by Lord. It is time for me to read that again soon. The next favorite part of American history is that related to the expansion of industry. There is much more to that story than most people realize. My daughters often complained about having to share a house with 4,000 books. I just cannot throw a book away or even give it away if I have invested enough of myself into it to read it or if I have not yet found the time to read it. I admit that I hope that my eyesight will be good when I am 80 so I can use a good part of my time to read the many books I have not yet gotten to! I find it is a good thing to read history written in our present, but also an interesting exercise to read the history written in earlier times. The history written in earlier times helps to explain the choices people made in those times and sometimes the truth has passed from fashion and new mythologies have taken their place. Sometimes old mythologies are revealed in new works. This is a dynamic issue and a two-way street. It seems that as men created mythological heroes and mythological gods and religions, so too do they create mythological history. The fact that some are creating a mythology of Ayn Rand is a piece with this history. The importance of knowing history for making wise judgments about current political issues is sadly and tragically misunderstood by most Americans today. Far too many have opinions uninformed by a knowledge of history. It is no accident that you and I share a different view of the current political issues than do most of our fellow Objectivists and countrymen. You are very interesting man, James.

If Objectivism can be turned into a cult, then clearly any philosophy can be. It is mindboggling that the philosophy of reason, individualism, and achievement has large elements claiming to adhere to Objectivism who are cultists. It is hard to believe that so many people view Objectivism as a weapon to cut down others and to give them superiority, rather than as a philosophy for living life.

James, Barbara, and Roger, There seem to be at least two kinds of people who think of themselves as Objectivists. I, and I suspect James, did not experience as sharp a discontinuity in my life as I became an Objectivist as do many Objectivists. While my parents were religious and they were temporarily very angry with me, I never lost sight of my appreciation for having been raised in a loving home, having been given responsibilities early on, and having proven that I was responsible having been given great freedom early on. I was encouraged to think and to think for myself. We talked about politics and foreign affairs at home. When my father had his Navy friends or other friends over, I frequently joined in the discussions. My father never got a degree, but he was always taking college and graduate courses. My parents always provided me with many books and took me to the library when I wanted to go there. I was encouraged to work hard at school, but not really pushed. I did the pushing. I had a wonderful childhood and I have always loved my parents and my sisters and brother for it. After a momentary shock with my being an atheist, my family got over it and we are still close. It is a very disrupting thing to lose such an important connection to who you were, as was noted above. Some Objectivists become Objectivists because it can be used as a marvelously wicked tool for criticizing and putting down virtually everyone else. This must have a great appeal for some people who had an unhappy childhood. It is easy to craft Objectivism into a tool that makes the good people wicked and the wicked people monsters. If we allow ourselves to do this then we cut ourselves off from our families, our old friends, and most people in the communities in which we live. Some distancing from many people is inevitable as an Objectivist, but we should not aggravate it and relish it. There are many good people who are not nearly perfect. Our perfect ideals as Objectivists should not force us to be the enemy of the good because it is not perfect. If we allow ourselves to go down this path, we not only do an injustice to many of the people close to us in our earlier life, but we also do an injustice to the self who had sufficiently good qualtities that we could understand the good and the truth of Objectivism. Not everyone does. Oftentimes, the few who do owe their family some proper gratitude for helping them to make themselves able to do so.

James, First, I want to compliment you on the quality of your writing. I enjoyed this article on that level and I have generally found enjoyment in your other notes as well. You are a fine craftsman. While I have never been a great fan of opera, my wife loves it. Like you, I love reading history and it was my real reason for becoming interested in school. I learned to read late and it was history that finally gave me reason to want to read. I loved the heroes of history especially, at first John Paul Jones, Chief Black Hawk, Kit Carson, Rogers of Rogers' Rangers, etc. A little later I added Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Edison. I also played baseball as my primary sport until we moved to RI when I was in the 7th grade. I would often play baseball for 3 hours a day in the summers. My 5th birthday was 27 April 1952, so we have a kind of anti-polar connection on that day.

Of course this is a complicated matter and dependent upon one's ability to judge the character of the President and his advisors though we do not have any personal contact with them. I have never met George Bush or Bob Chaney or Donald Rumsfeld. However, from listening to them speak about issues, they seem to me to be the most knowledgable, the most sound thinkers, and the most concerned with the truth of any set of leaders we have had at least since Eisenhower, when I was too young to make anything like a comparable judgment. George Bush tries to be honest. He makes mistakes as any President will in the overwhelmingly expanded presidency. If you run a small company or if you are a parent, matters are already so complex that you will make mistakes. It is not reasonable to believe that a President will not make some substantial mistakes. President Bush and his advisors are trying hard. They are commonly quite candid as well, though the constant attacks of the media have caused them to not share information they would rather share. Put yourself in their shoes. Bush is more honest than Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, Johnson, and Kennedy for sure! How ironic that he has to bear the brunt of so many accusations that he lied. He had some intelligence information which was out-of-date and this information came both from American sources and from European sources. To be wrong about something is not to lie. I really think a terrible injustice is being done to a very decent man. There are significant differences that I have with George Bush, but those are fewer than I have had with other Presidents in my lifetime. A number of these relate to religious views of morality, with which I disagree. However, while there is talk about the government making us be more moral as the Christians interpret it, there is very little in the way of additional action to make us do so. I have been careful to point out my disagreements with Bush and the Republicans on a number of such issues at my blog, primarily at the time of the last election. The idea of bombing Iraq from the air would mostly have been symbolic. It would not have closed down Uday's terrorist training camps, I expect. On rebuilding Iraq, I think I would put the emphasis on getting the oil flowing again. This would help to bring down the cost of oil and reduce the power of those nasty leaders of many other oil-rich countries. It would produce a great deal of money for the Iraqis. Put them back to work and let them build their own infra-structure with the new wealth that would be available to many. One of the biggest problems in Iraq is the fact that half of Iraqi men have no jobs. With a surging economic prosperity, most of them would lose interest in hating Americans and gain an interest in finding ways to protect property and getting along with each other. My main criticism of the occupation is that it has failed to do this. I would also be inclined to allow Iraq to separate into 3 parts, if those parts do not soon learn to cooperate. The Sunnis have been the source of most of the problems. Let the Kurds and the Shia have autonomy and take their oil with them. Leave the Sunni with near nothing. Take the American troops out of the hot Sunni areas and leave them to squabble over nothing. They had their opportunity for a better future and if they choose not to take it, let suffer the consequences. Their actually are many Sunnis who are coming around, though one would have hoped they might have understood their interest sooner. Kat, I am very happy to have your company on the proper and sufficient reason for war, which was the one reason never given. This has aggravated me to no end. Iraq failed to honor the armistice, Saddam declared war on the US verbally, he fired on our planes frequently, he allowed terrorists safe-haven, he trained terrorists, and he provided money to terrorist. I sure would think this was sufficient reason for finishing the job of hunting him down. I would also be happy to see us offer, say, $100 million for Osama bin Laden's head. LW, you are quite right that occupation does bring with it some of the same problems faced by a slaveholder. It is a very uncomfortable business. Best to keep it short and move on. We really could have used the oil to help this happen more quickly.

Phil, Michael's request for this list sounds great to me too, if you can devote enough of your copious free time to making the list. Roger Donway used to joke that David Kelley should read the many books Roger suggested he read in his copious free time when we were undergraduates at Brown.

Dennis, Focusing on one part of the quote you gave: WWII was a very desperate war, which for a very long while seemed very uncertain of outcome to many. We did not have precision bombing capabiities. The Norden bomb sight was pretty much the state of the art and it was nothing compared to our guided weaponry of today. The Germans were the ones with at least some guided weapon capability. We turned to whole city bombing largely in desperation and the effects according to military analysis after the war were not good. Attempts to target critical factories, to stop the rolling traffic, particularly the trains, and to hit tanks and troops when they moved with air power were much more effective. I fully support the use of the atomic bombs on Japan. It saved many American lives. One can even argue for it simply on the basis that many fewer Japanese died because they were used. Now, we have much more accurate weapons and we are fighting a disaffected bunch of thugs and some fanatical terrorists. We have the superior weapons by far. I would support using them somewhat more aggressively than we do, but apparently not nearly as aggressively as you would with respect to civilian casualties. I do not believe that the best way to provide for the security of Americans and for our quality of life is to terrorize the rest of the world. The best path is to earn their respect as a proud, industrious, benevolent people. Despite the fact that much of the world loves to carp about us, we have done wonders to set the right atmosphere for a blossoming of world trade, the opening of much of the world to American ideas, the improved production of science, food, clothing, and many goods around the world that are improving the standard of living of many people in those countries where the political systems will allow it. The countries benefiting the most are those with systems somewhat similar to ours, with something of an exception to be made for China. Compared to earlier world history, the world has been safer since WWII thanks to our policies. I think they have generally been pretty effective, though I would have eliminated most of the foreign aid and the support of numerous dictators. I think most people around the world do have a high level of respect for the USA and that is substantially why we have had to fight relatively little. We have had a great deal of cooperation in the War on Terror. Well, clearly you and I are not going to agree on how America should fight its wars. Of course, neither you nor I are making these decisions. Mostly, the American military is making them. So, lets put ourselves in their shoes a bit more. I will use the example of Vietnam. Suppose I enter a Vietnamese village during the day. We know the North Vietnamese were there the night before and forced the people to give them rice. My platoon commander tells me to shoot the women and children because they aided the enemy. I say no. He says he will shoot me if I do not shoot them. My response is to shoot my platoon leader before he shoots me. Guess what? I would be far from the only guy in Vietnam who would make that choice. Are you then going to execute all of the soldiers who make the the same decision I did? To effectively carry out the policy you want, you will have to. The rubber meets the road. Theory has to operate on concretes and the particular. The American, whether a soldier or not, is a thinking, independent-minded, ornery man. He is also pretty wonderfully benevolent-minded. Some may be altruistic, some simply love and respect life. In the end, we have to have government policies that can deal with the nature of the American man. Few of us want to behave like the Huns.

Dustan, Thanks for jumping on board. It has become so popular to bash President Bush without regard to the alternatives and without respect for the political process that it takes a brave man to offer him any support. The Republican Party does have some severe ideological problems and it is important that we identify them and suggest a more rational policy to them. But, there is little point in simply doing this in a mood of "If you are not willing to be perfect, you are my worst enemy." After the religious right block of Republicans, the next biggest group is fairly libertarian in orientation. Even among the religious right, not all members of the group want to legislate Christian morality and many are relatively free market in their orientation. Of course, the Republicans are a diverse and ideological impure coalition of many groups. We will face this until and unless many more people become Objectivists or neo-objectivists.

LW, I fully agree with you that I would like to see a reduction of government spending and deficits. I do wish Bush would use the veto on a substantial number of spending bills inconsistent with the Constitution. I suspect that he thinks that there is such a desire on the part of both Republicans and Democrats in Congress that he cannot sustain a veto. Or, maybe there was a deal made on the tax cuts. I think the intelligence on many things, other than the disposition of Saddam's troops, was very poor. I think that was a long time legacy, rather than something that occurred under Bush. This is not to say that Bush had yet moved to address these problems. I think his initial attention was on things such as tax cuts and addressing problems in the military. The intelligence agencies of several other countries also appear to have had less than adequate information. I do think that Saddam had some weapons that were considered weapons of mass destruction earlier and had them moved out of the country with Russian help, but we have less than certain information on that to my knowledge. If the Russians did this, it would not be surprising that the administration would simply not want any information they now have released for public examination. I grant that because we are all given limited information on our intelligence collecting and interpreting capabilities, there is room for rational disagreement here. I am not saying that because we have not been attacked at home that it is clear that the Iraq War is the cause of this. I am suggesting a caution that the package of things that Bush is doing has not failed in preventing such attacks and that given our relative lack of knowledge of what is going on, it might be wise not to excessively second-guess Bush. Part of Bush's realization of the nature of the War on Terror was that if you are to get most of the nations of the world involved in eliminating terrorists, then you need to go after all of the terrorists. Iraq was training and supporting terrorists, including some Al Queda. They may have been secular by Middle Eastern standards, but they were using the Muslim radical unrest to Saddam's advantage. And, a point I make over and over, Iraq did attack us many times. Every time Saddam attacked an American plane, he attacked America. It is a terrible mistake not to respond in most such cases. We learned the advantages early in our history when we did not give ransom to the Barbary pirates. As I pointed out, we do not want to attack and overthrow every dictator in the world. We want to keep them under control by at least making an example of those who really get out-of-control. Saddam was probably the most out-of-control dictator around at the time. The fact of his atrocities at home and the frequent firings on American planes demonstrated this. There is another thing we have to remember. The discussion of our reasons for the war was unfortunately carried out mostly in the context of trying to get UN approval of supporting resolutions. Bush had to frame the discussion for maximum effect on the UN. I believe that this greatly distorted the rational reasons for the war and contributed heavily to the perception that Bush was lying to the American people. He could not tell the UN the things that would have an effect on them and then turn to the American people and give them a different and more sound assessment. This may be a very good reason to oppose the UN. We do want the President of the USA to be able to be as candid as possible about wars with the American people.

Dennis, I do not see that Stephen's quote reveals altruism. In fact, the following part of the quote suggests that his motivation is not altruistic. Integrity is being consistent in attempting to achieve one's values and goals. If one of the goals of the war is to hold to a minimum innocent casualtites, then one has integrity when doing so. There is no simple trade-off in war between the number of American casualties and the number of civilian casualties. Suppose we had taken the attitude that no American would be put at risk so that 25 Iraqi schoolchildren might be saved. Would the Kurds and the Shia be as cooperative now? Would we have as many Sunnis providing intelligence against the Sunni insurgents as we have now? If we were willing to appear as bloodthirsty invaders and cared not the least for the children, you can be sure the war would be going much worse than it is now. There would be no hope for Iraq becoming a responsible country in the near future.

Barbara, I thought that I was arguing for a rational effort to avoid civilian casualties and nothing more all along. I agree that we should try hard to avoid the loss of American lives. There will inevitably be cases in which civilians will suffer because we have to protect American lives. Nonetheless, Americans themselves will choose to take some risks to avoid the killing of too many women and children. It is our nature and that is not simply due to a misbegotten altruism. It is natural for those who have a high regard for the value of human life to wish not to kill other humans. Most of us are willing to distinguish among those who may be responsible for the aggressive acts to which we must respond and those who are playing no active role in the aggression. At the least, killing children is an awful business. The soldier who has done so and seen the result, pays a price for it. It may be an accident of war and it may have been necessary, but it is emotionally very unpleasant. It is also frequently counterproductive to the very goals for which the war is being fought. A rational evaluation of how it affects those goals for a given war is required. Sometimes saving the life of an American soldier today comes at the expense of the lives of two soldiers tomorrow. Making the decisions on how a war should be fought is always a gruesome business. More and more in America, it is a thankless business.

Dennis, There have always been Americans who opposed every American war. Some are pacificists and some simply disagreed with the particulars of a given war. Certainly seeing men die and seeing them maimed is an awful experience. America came into being in a war against the greatest military power of its day. Some thought self-governance and the rights of man were worth fighting for. Some either thought they were not or that the United Kingdom was as close to freedom as they would get. New England threatened to secede in the War of 1812. Many opposed the war with Mexico, many the Civil War, many the Spanish-American War, World War I, and some even WWII. The Korean War and the Vietnam War had widespread opposition. It is an American tradition to oppose wars. I thought that the Vietnam War was the wrong war to fight because of the location, the use of the draft, and the minimal extent of our national interest, but that the cause was just with respect to the South Vietnamese. After a point we had expended so much American blood and put our South Vietnamese allies at such risk, that we had to complete the job. Our ignoble exit, our betrayal of the South Vietnamese, was the most disgusting experience of my life. When you enter a dark and dangerous alley with a decent man to cover your back and then you abandon him there when the going gets tough, you are no man. This was made worse by the fact that the Tet Offensive doomed the North Vietnamese if only we had blocked off the Ho Chi Minh Trail and otherwise not unwisely tied our soldier's hands behind their backs. I think Iraq is a war much more in our interest than was Vietnam. Unfortunately, many people are so jaded after the Vietnam War that they cannot understand why. Many Americans no longer think that it is worth fighting the bullies if an American soldier will die. The world is full of bullies and the certain recipe for retreat and finally defeat at their hands is the lack of will to fight them. Showing such a lack of will, will result in more deaths in the end, as the bullies gang up on us after subjugating many of the weaker countries of the world. Clearly my perspective is very different than yours. When the schoolyard bully tried to intimidate me, I found that if you showed them you were willing to fight if they forced the issue and you were doing it as a matter of conviction, they hardly ever did. In fact, they did not bother you later. I even had cases where the bully so respected me that when other bullies threatened they would say, "Hey, Charles is OK, leave him alone." Sure this is a microcosm of the world at the nation level, but in my extensive reading of history, the same effects are found in that realm as well. Bullies are pretty much the same, whether on the playground or as heads of nations. This is not really surprising, given that the bully operates at a childish level. Brats and bullies need some discipline and only America provides that in this world. Perhaps you know an alternative. Spell it out, if you do. The whole world wants to know.

L.W., I hold ideals and I hope to influence others such that the society I live in will substantially share those ideals in time. Now, there are many ideals that Americans do not share. When it comes to advocating government policies, we should be realistic enough to recognize that fact. So, I want a very small and limited Constitutional government with very low taxes and no deficit spending. I am not able to see any way that the government will give me that with the present electorate, the present education system, and the present set of politicians. Hope for something better as hard as we may, we cannot change others until they opt to change themselves. Tax cuts such as investment tax cuts and cuts on the upper tax brackets do not result in less government tax revenue. They have always resulted in more government tax revenue. The socialist press insists that the tax cuts mean less revenue and this plays on the expectations of those who hold a static view of the economy. The economy is very dynamic. Investors invest their money with a keen eye to the tax consequences. They move money from highly taxed but otherwise productive purposes into less taxed and less productive purposes quickly and readily when taxes become too high. Lower the taxes and money is used more productively and more wealth is created. The lower tax rates then bring in more tax revenue both because money is moved into those spheres of activity where the rate is higher, but has been reduced from what it once was, and because more wealth has been created. When Coolidge and Harding cut taxes, government revenue went up. When Hoover increased taxes and Roosevelt increased taxes, government revenue went down. When Kennedy cut taxes, government revenue went up. When Reagan cut taxes, government revenue went up. When Bush I increased taxes, government revenue went down. When Clinton cut taxes, revenue started up, then he increased taxes and it went down. When Bush II decreased taxes, government revenue went up. Do you see the pattern? After entering Iraq, the weapons of mass destruction were not found and there was no explanation that would hold up under the barrage from the socialist press for that. Bush said that no weapons were found. This does not say that they were not there at an earlier time and that there was not good reason to think they were under on-going development. It does not say that many were not removed. It does not even say that they are not buried. Clearly the Sunni thugs still have access to many weapons caches we have never found. While weapons of mass destruction included a variety of weapons such as nerve gases, which Saddam had and used, but got rid of before the invasion, biological agents, and nuclear weapons for most people at the time of the discussion. You seem to ignore the nerve gases and maybe the biological weapons. The Iraqis shooting at our planes constituted a violation of the armistice and a clear and present danger to our pilots. Because some idiot has inferior weapons and inferior fighting skills, this does not mean that we are obligated to even the odds by giving him an infinite number of potshots and the assurance that the Iraqi leadership will suffer no consequences. Francisco and Dagny sure did not follow that policy. Actually, Dagny was downright ruthless. If you value American lives, you should include the value of the lives of our pilots. You should also remember that thugs who get away with violence, resort to it more and more and escalate its scale. It is commonly good to nip it in the bud, which is a job Clinton should have performed with a higher priority than Kosovo. You have made the standard media argument that if we do not simultaneously attack every thug and every terrorist harbor at once, we have no business attacking any. Interesting. So if the world has many thugs, we should appease them all? We should then simply give the world to them? Or should we set an example of at least one or two (say Afghanistan and Iraq) and send a lesson, which at least Libya paid some attention to? There is evidence that Iran, Syria, and N. Korea have paid some attention also, though they continue on irrational courses encouraged by our press and media criticism of Bush. You refer to the war being sold under false pretenses. Please enumerate those false pretenses. Try to be precise about what the weapons of mass destruction were, among other things. You might also pay some attention to noting that the debate was too largely with Europe and the UN, so that the discussion with the American people was short-changed. The invasion was handled very well in its phase. The occupation of the Sunni held areas was clearly more difficult than expected. However, our military and our intelligence services suffered great deterioration during the Clinton years. He and his admistration were very anti-military. They treated the military with obvious disdain and they systematically put numerous wrong people in power positions. This has serious consequences, which it takes years to fix. The intelligence limitations are no surprise. They clearly needed to be addressed. A relatively new President cannot instantly address all problems and his efforts often take years to take effect. As for a clear-cut plan for disengagement, war is commonly so complex that such plans never work. In this case, more should have been known about the internal affairs in Iraq and more thought should have been given to the many possible consequences. Then one has to proceed with a great willingness to be flexible. This means one has plans, many plans based on various contingencies. Unfortunately, we did not have the intelligence on the ground that was needed. This has been true for many years, wherever we have had conflicts. You consistently over-estimate the power of the President. Our Federal government was substantially designed to limit his power. In addition to Congress and the ever more powerful courts limiting his power, the instant spread of news and the pundits discussions of policy also serve to limit his power. Another limit is the now huge bureaucracy, which was not envisioned by the Framers of the Constitution. It lumbers along with ideas of its own, which are usually in strong correlation of the power of the persons and the agencies themselves, rather than how they will serve the rights of man. You do not see us as any safer than pre-invasion? Perhaps you could prescribe that course of action which would be more successful than the zero deaths that have occurred due to terrorists in the US since 9/11? Apparently, if terrorists were not flocking to Iraq, you figure they would not produce deadly attacks in the US. How do you know that? It seems they have in England and Spain. Remember WWII? Clearly we would have had fewer deaths for years to come if we had simply ignored the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Had we moved what troops we could back the US and sat here, we would likely have had few deaths until maybe 1950. After Hitler defeated the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, which he may readily have done without America providing them the benefit of our massive production capabilities, the results would have been many more deaths. You and the media do not seem to have come to grips with the threat that the Islamofascists present to our living in an open society with free enquiry and speech. They are attempting a total war with the West and modernity. We are unwise to ignore this effort and we cannot simply count the deaths of some of our troops and say they are too many. Civilizaton is being challenged by ruthless men who not only enjoy cutting people's heads off, but who are very willing to take the world back to 1000. This is pre-Renaissance, let alone pre-Enlightenment. You should pay some attention to what our soldiers in Iraq think they are accomplishing. You are not paying the primary cost of the war, they are. Do they want to stay home or do they want to challenge the Islamofascists? In an economy of $13 trillion, the cost of the war is not untold. It may be substantial, but it is cheap compared to Vietnam and really cheap compared to WWII. But it is a lot if you really dislike the war. So is the amount of money going into unconstitutional activities a lot of money.

Paul, I agree that our nature is a complex amalgam of many factors. Among these are our genetic make-up, our exposure to chemicals in the womb, the people around us as we grow up and even much later in life, the circumstances of our lives, the continuous stream of our thoughts, and the actions we choose to take. Undoubtedly, the genetic differences between men and women are important. No doubt, the differing early childhood expectations of us are of importance. But all of the factors in the list I gave above further differentiate us. We are extremely complex and extremely individual. So much so, that it is surely impossible to truly adopt someone else's perspective, especially if that someone else is of the other sex. But still impossible even when they are of the same sex. I have never met a man who thinks the way I do. Period. Never. I have met men and women with whom I can share certain blocks of my thought and find that they appreciate and share similar thoughts, but then there is always some other block of my thoughts which is anathema or puzzling to them. When I do find someone who is interested in discussing the issues of one such block of thought and is reasonably receptive, it is a thrilling, pleasant experience. I love these long and deep discussions with another intelligent, thinking, perceptive individual. I have found such people among men and women, but they are rare. I have also found people with very different perspectives who are fascinating. Some of these people have experiences very different from mine and grew up surrounded by people with substantially different natures than those I grew up with. Sometimes, the main thing we do share is an interest in understanding things and that can go a long way, though we are not likely to go home together. Now, I am not going to claim that no one can be largely successful in adopting the perspective of anyone else. I know that I am more different from most people than most people are. It would be invalid for me to expect that my perspective is adequate to make such a judgment. Nonetheless, I do see lots of evidence that people have a great deal of difficulty in understanding the perspective of others. Given all the factors that affect one's perspective, this is exactly what it is reasonable to expect. To be more concrete, I see that jealousy and envy are important emotions for many people. I can remember observing this when I was about 6 and thinking that these are ugly, degrading, and destructive emotions, though I am sure I was using simpler words for that idea or that I had more vaguely identified that. When I felt a bit of these emotions, I was disgusted with myself. But, for whatever reason, I do not think I felt them often and I did not feel them strongly. And because I thought about them they appeared less and less often in my life. I confess that it is mostly a puzzle to me that these emotions are often very strong in other people. I can imagine that they might be for someone who was terribly deprived of the comforts of life, but they very often apply to those who were not. In any case, I really am unable to put myself into the perspective of someone who is substantially subject to these emotions. I agree with you that relationships with those we love, our spouses, children, and friends, do help us to explore and develop ourselves. This is a major benefit of having relationships. It is what makes the early part of a new relationship really exciting in many cases. Now, since I had a very feminine mother and four sisters, I would not say that my wife was a particularly gear-shifting introduction to the feminine psyche, though she was with respect to sex. At the age of 25, I had my first sexual experience with her and that was a gear-shifting experience. I really had had no idea what I was missing in the years before that. I had never experienced the raging male hormomes that many of my friends had. I truly could not understand why they would go out with a girl who was foolish, boring, not especially good-looking, just in the hopes of having sex with her. Now, having experienced sex, I found that it was a pleasure so great, that it would be the closest thing to an argument for the existence of a benevolent god that I know of. My wife calls me insatiable. But, why was I so different that before that I really had little interest. Maybe it was just a terrible lack of imagination! Well, when it comes to sex, I have no lack of imagination now. By the way, I did get into reading a lot of science fiction in the 7th and 8th grades. Much later, I revisted it a bit and even read some fantasy stories. I think I did not like fairy tales when I was very young simply because I had such a hunger to know more about the real world then. Later, knowing more about it, I was willing to think about how it could be different. There are a great many things I would like to see different. I think that my passions and emotions were pretty well integrated long before I encountered Ayn Rand. She was a great help in filling in some important gaps in my theoretical understanding of philosophy and refined my ability to argue for my ideas. She may have greatly helped me in avoiding being overrun by more commonly accepted ideas at a later time. However, I had long argued for many of the same ideas before I knew of her work. I had a great respect for reason, the life of the individual, for self-responsibility, for productive work, for Capitalism, for limited government, a love of heroes, and a substantial doubt about Christianity, though I had earlier been a pretty devout kid. I had loved reading about resourceful heroes since the 4th grade. They were my motivation for reading. I started reading BusinessWeek in the 6th grade, when my Dad started getting it for a course in business management. I found it fascinating to read about what people were doing in the real world and soon came to appreciate how wonderfully we all benefited from the productive work of businessmen. Ayn Rand was the first person I ever came across who agreed with me on all of these things. She also introduced me to ideas I had not thought about and provided a more philosophical structure, but mostly she was the first person who did not disagree with me about many things. You comment that knowing that one is in a web of relationships and experiencing it from an orientation of consciousness through which it flows are not the same. I agree. But I do not have more than a superficial ability to view relationships from the perspective of anyone else's consciousness. I suspect that this is only possible if one's own consciousness is rather similar to that of the other person. This is not to say that it is not helpful to try to view things from someone else's perspective, but one has to realize how limited one's ability is to do this. Or is this just a problem for me, because I am too different? Maybe, but I really cannot make this judgment from anyone's perspective but mine. I suppose there may be some value in the testimony of others, but such testimony may be about as reliable as that of those who claim to directly know God. You ask how do we align our intuitive perspective with our analytic perspective? I do not have even much personal perspective on this. I have had so little conflict here that I have little experience in rectifying the two. Or is it just that I am blind to the conflicts that exist? Well, I do not think so, but friends may be able to point out some problems I am overlooking! I have to admit that one of the reasons I have read little about psychology is because I do not have many things troubling me with respect to internal conflicts. I am coming to have more interest in trying to understand what conflicts other people have. I certainly see that most people do have such conflicts. Sometimes this missing internal conflict causes me to be a bit disconnected from most of the human race. Some people pick up on my lack of internal conflict and quickly decide that I am too unlike them to be of interest. I can see why that makes sense from their perspective. Sometimes this contributes to a sense of loneliness on my part, so I suppose that I do have a problem. It is not so much internal though as it is external. Others might say that I am abnormal and therefore unhealthy. This lack of internal conflict is not to say that I always knew what I know now about myself. I have continued to learn who I am and to further develop my own potentials in many ways. I see little to nothing that I have learned that I learned when I did because I had suppressed it. Most of what I learned simply took time to think about and a string of experiences over time that required a timeline. I do grant that some things might have been attended to earlier, but then that might just have meant that other things I did attend to would have been delayed. I am pretty OK with the way things have evolved. There are many things I have learned and become aware of when the time was right for them. I was relatively fine with knowing that I was different than other kids when I was a teenager. I thought more, I was happier, and I liked more people. I liked the kids who were geeks without social skills. I liked the guys on the football team. Most of my friends were very intelligent and we played a lot of sandlot sports. I especially loved tackle football without pads. I was usually either the smallest guy on the field or one of the two smallest. I took a get deal of pride in being the toughest, the best tackler, and in rarely dropping a ball when I was a receiver. Of course, I had to hang on to that ball, because I was never very fast. I had friends I played chess with, friends I played contract bridge with, and the occasional, but too seldom, friend who wanted to discuss ideas. I always thought of myself as very different, but I always had friends. The friendships were never as deep as I thought friendships should be, however. Finally, you suggest that I read Nathaniel Branden's work. I should try it again. I own about 4 of his books and I read 1 or 1.5 of them some long time back. From the perspective of having many more years of puzzling over the nature of other people, I should be better able to keep up an interest in the subject than before.

L. W. Hall, I do not understand how virtually everyone has come to believe that it is perfectly OK for a dictator to shoot at American planes, not once, but almost daily for many months. This kind of act has always been cause for war. This same dictator said repeatedly that he was at war with the USA. He ran training camps for terrorists in which he trained thousands of them per year. He used terrible gas weapons on his own people. No, amend that. His own people were a tribe or two around Tikrit. The Kurds and the Shiites were his enemies. These gas weapons are at least at some level weapons of mass destruction. He was determined to pursue nuclear weapons when the embargo was ended. Recently translated documents have shown that he was indeed shopping for yellow cake uranium in Niger, as reported by British intelligence. There is reason to believe the Russians helped him to move some weapons of mass destruction out of the country not long before the 2nd Gulf War. This is actually a misnomer. The Gulf War started under the first George Bush and was never ended. An armistice was signed and Saddam violated it. George Bush the son simply recognized this. There were many in the world who wanted the oil embargo of Iraq ended. The French, the Russians, the Chinese were especially prominent among these. It would not have taken Saddam long to create a dirty bomb and turn it over to terrorist groups to have them use it on us or Israel. With such a vicious and hateful man, this was a very reasonable concern. Little of the damage in Iraq that affects the lives of the people there was caused by the Americans. Saddam caused most of it simply by taxing the people and spending the money on his palaces and unbelievably large weapons caches. He neglected the water supply and the sewers, the electric utilities, and the roads. He allowed the oil field equipment, the pipelines, and the refineries to fall into disrepair. He allowed the schools to deteriorate. He also degraded his people and caused them to lose hope. They became ineffective and lost their capabilities. This will happen after 30 years of dictatorship. Some damage was caused in the second part of the war, but then much more has been caused by Sunnis unhappy not to be the bullies in charge anymore. Do not attribute this act by them to America. On the issue of fiscal conservativism: Sure, I wish government would so limit its scope that there would be no deficit and few taxes. President Bush seems to have made a bargain, which he should not have to make, but probably did have to make with the crowd in the House and Senate. They believe that delivering the goodies to their home districts is what gets them re-elected. They may be right in many, if not most, cases. President Bush gets tax cuts pushed through Congress and the economy grows handsomely in response. The government brings in more tax revenue with the lower taxes. The private sector has much more money to use productively than it had prior to the tax reduction. This generates still more wealth, a smaller part of which is taxed and is spent wastefully by Congress. Indeed, Congress spends even more money than the extra amount of tax income it now has. We run record deficits. Ah, but these are records in terms of the number of dollars. They are actually relatively small compared to the growth of the GDP or measures of the private sector economy. Now, were we better off with higher taxes and smaller deficits or are we better off with a booming economy, few people on unemployment, fewer people in need of housing, a larger deficit which is a smaller part of the growing economy, and a lot of additional money being devoted to private sector productive work? If President Bush gave Congress a check to waste money up to and a little bit beyond the tax revenues in order to get the tax cuts, he may well have done a wise thing. If he manages to get them to give him additional tax cuts because they are fat and happy, this would be a good thing. Now, as it happens, Congress is so foolish, that they do not understand how good a thing the tax cuts have been for them, so it is not clear that President Bush will get his further tax cuts. We shall see just how dumb Congress can be. I get angry too that government is not what it should be. I understand the frustration. American's idea of the nature of government is not very good. It has some healthy aspects, but many more disappointments. They do not understand their Constitution, they do not understand the nature of man, and they do not understand the effect of placing power in the hands of others to run their lives. They reap the consequences of their lack of understanding. Some politicians completely pander to this ignorance. President Bush sometimes bows to it, but he tries to find ways to do what he thinks needs to be done even in the face of it. The war in Iraq is a strong case in point.

James, Thanks for your comments. I agree that there may be some savings for the rest of the Medicare program from the wise use of prescription drugs and I hope the government is able to manage the program in such a way as to actually benefit from such savings. We may see another example of such bad management that the potential value of the program will be lost. We shall see. It is also the case that the implementation of the Medical Savings Plans is a good move. Maybe Madeleine Cozman will prove right about how important that program is. I fully agree with you that there is often a great deal of anger on the part of libertarians and objectivists that the candidate with the best chance to win the election and who is most favorable to Capitalism and limited government is less than perfect. They will reject the better man because he is not better than he is. This feeling seems to be related to the awfulness of a family feud or a civil war. It reminds one of the feud between the Nazis and the Communists. It is childish and foolish. Particularly so because we can almost always carry on a conversation with George Bush and know he is listening. He may not agree, but he at least will think about our argument. He may not be a perfect Capitalist, but he admires Capitalism. He may not be emphatic about reducing government programs, but he does agree that government should have limits. He respects the ability of the people to be self-responsible and to lead productive lives. This is so much more important than whether there is some possible wire-tapping going on of calls from overseas terrorists which have not been court approved. I think we both share an appreciation for the lessons of history. The political and cultural viewpoints of a nation evolve over a pretty significant amount of time, generally. If they do change fairly rapidly, it will only be due to a cataclysmic event or series of events. This is quite rare. The Civil War was something of such an event, but despite that wrenching experience, there was much that still changed only slowly. Few people who believed in socialism at age 30 do not now still believe in socialism. People do not give up their beliefs but with great reluctance. A libertarian general viewpoint will have to wait at least until the Baby Boomers are a small minority of the population and the Great Depression generation has passed. Thanks especially for your comments on the Medicare issue. I admit that President Bush might yet prove right on that issue. That program is in an awful state in general and does need lots of fixing.

James, Well done. There are so few people who share our evaluation of President Bush that your post was a very pleasant read for me. He has definitely been as good a President as can be elected to that office in America today. His tax cuts have allowed the economy to grow at a sufficient rate to make the larger than desirable deficits small in comparison. I do hope the tax cuts not yet made permanent will become so. His efforts to hold Islamofascists at bay have been admirable, though I do wish he had done a better job of explaining why the war in Iraq was needed. It will be highly unfortunate that the Social Security System will not be privatized soon. The Medicare system is a disaster and it is not clear that President Bush has any will to address its problems. He has been an advocate of small business and entrepreneurship, which is itself important. He has not proven stalwart in reducing the size and scope of government in fact, though he sometimes suggests it should not be on our backs. He carries some baggage for the Christian right which is also a problem. Our biggest problems are the war on terror, taxes, government regulation, Social Security, and Medicare. President Bush has done very well on the war on terror and taxes. He seems well disposed toward government regulation and Social Security, but has done little about either problem. Medicare he has made worse. His two presidential challengers would have wanted to do the wrong thing on all of the above. If President Bush had good men to back him in the House and Senate, he likely would have done better. The problem in our Federal government now is that we need better men in the House and Senate and in much of the Federal bureaucracy. The 12 year period between President Reagan and President Bush saw a lot of damage done at the bureaucracy level, which is really never very good anyway. It is very convenient to blame every problem on the President. It should be remembered that the Federal government is so huge and has its hands in so many things, that it is unmanageable. It has no organizational focus. It is a conglomerate of everything. Of course, any President can be said to be doing many things wrong or inadequately. We put a President on a wild beast more unwieldy than an elephant and more cantankerous than a donkey. It has a voracious appetite for money and power. We surround him with demagogues wanting power, attention, and money and they prod the beast and incite the crowd (electorate). It is basically a Roman circus designed to entertain the masses, most of whom do not understand what is going on now, what went on in earlier American history, or that the Constitution was written to strictly limit the size of the beast, its appetite, and the size of its circus ring. Now, if only this President would ignore things like the first World Trade Center bombing, the bombing of the African embassies, the state of the military, and concentrate on titilating activities with young women in the Oval Room which are not sex, he would be so much more entertaining to the masses. He should want good things for the poor, such as a higher minimum wage. Of course he should punish the oil companies for high gas prices with a windfall profits tax. Why, he would be accepted as human and one of them. It is good to have a President with a good measure of common sense, some business experience, and who thinks a President should do the right thing, rather than simply play to the crowd.