Letters.

--It has been evident from the beginning that you do not like George W. Bush. Now, Mark Helprin's "Phony War" (April 22) is the straw that finally broke the camel's back.

Why is it that every other journalist has suddenly become an armchair general who takes it upon himself to second-guess our brightest military and civilian minds? How is it that in hindsight everything is subject to negative criticism? Have you forgotten that there is a war on and that what the president needs is support, not dissension in the ranks?

As the nation's premier conservative journal you have failed -- yes, failed -- in your duty to support your party with constructive, not destructive, comments.

Charlotte Anderson

Wayne, Pa.

--Mark Helprin presented valid reasons for a significant increase in military spending. Unfortunately, he did not explain where the money is going to come from. Republicans like to pretend that the government programs they want -- the military, law enforcement, and business subsidies -- can be paid for with pennies from heaven.

NR's use of a World War II propaganda poster in conjunction with this article is ironic. When the U.S. entered WWII, FDR did not beguile voters with agreeable lies about the revenue-building benefits of tax cuts. There were no exhortations to stimulate the economy by shopping and traveling. Instead, the income tax was doubled. Gasoline was rationed. The government forced Detroit to stop making civilian automobiles in favor of military vehicles.

That is the difference between Democratic fiscal responsibility and the fantasy economics of the GOP.

John Engelman

Walnut Creek, Calif.

--National Review should be saluted for publishing Jay Nordlinger's review of Paul Hollander's Discontents: Postmodern & Postcommunist (April 22). Foreign-born members of American academia who personally experienced persecution by Nazis and Communists, and who as refugees in America devote their lives and careers to the exposure of tyrannical Communist theories and practices, continue to be mostly unrecognized or underrated.

America must be kept updated on international socialism (Communism), whose atrocities against humanity lasted more than 70 years and caused millions of premature deaths.

The pathetic intellectual climate marked by secular materialism, irrationalism, relativism, and syncretism in philosophy still dominates but, thanks to unrelenting spirits like Paul Hollander, should be on its way out.

Libor Brom

Barrington, Ill.

--Jonah Goldberg's article "Dead and Buried" (April 8), regarding the ridiculous bickering over the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste storage site, was right on target -- with one small, but very significant, glitch.

Near the end of the piece, he wrote that "after 800 feet, the nucleotides would hit 1,000 feet of wet rock; and then, finally, they'd hit the water table."

Mr. Goldberg meant "nuclides," i.e., atoms as characterized by their numbers of protons, neutrons, and energy content (and hence their potential danger as radioactive waste). A "nucleotide," in contrast, is the basic structural unit of a DNA or RNA molecule. Thus, a "nucleotide" is a ribose or deoxyribose sugar joined to a pyrimidine or purine base and a phosphate group. Nucleotides are not radioactive in the slightest.

Joseph T. Leone

Madison, Wis.

--Jonah Goldberg replies: Sadly, Mr. Leone is, for the most part, correct, and I regret the inadvertent error. However, I should point out that numerous superheroes, Spiderman and the Hulk for instance, do in fact have radioactive nucleotides -- it's what makes them super. Still, Mr. Leone's point is well taken.

-- In his article "Strange Justice" (April 8), Byron York repackages the Wall Street Journal editorial board's claim that Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are puppets controlled by public- interest groups such as People for the American Way, the National Abortion Rights Action League, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and the Alliance for Justice.

The same kind of argument could be concocted to suggest that GOP senators are puppets of right-wing groups, citing as evidence Orrin Hatch's portrayal of the nomination battle as a "lynching" two days after the Eagle Forum made the same awful analogy. Either argument is ludicrous to anyone who knows the Democratic and Republican senators and how they work. It is in fact the clear constitutional responsibility of Senate Judiciary Committee members to carefully examine the records of federal judicial nominees.

The rest of Mr. York's piece is similarly divorced from reality. To assert, as he does, that Judge Pickering had only a "few small groups" in his corner and that there "simply was no group fighting on behalf of Pickering that had anything approaching the coalition's resources" is patently false.

The Eagle Forum, the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, the American Center for Law and Justice, the Center for Reclaiming America, the Free Congress Foundation, the American Conservative Union, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Sixty-Second Activist, the American Family Association, and Focus on the Family all issued press releases, "action alerts," or otherwise called upon their members to contact their senators or members of the committee and urge them to confirm Judge Pickering.

In addition, groups such as Concerned Women for America and the Family Research Council ran ad campaigns targeting Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, Sen. Joseph Biden, Sen. Herb Kohl, and Sen. Russ Feingold. American Renewal, the legislative arm of the Family Research Council, ran ads in South Dakota accusing Sen. Daschle of "obstructing the process by which judicial nominees are confirmed" and calling Pickering and other judicial nominees "Daschle Detainees." For its part, Concerned Women for America ran ads in Wisconsin, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Delaware defending Pickering while urging listeners to contact their senators and warn them not to allow special-interest groups "to destroy the reputations of good men and women," and "use [African Americans] to do it."

Mr. York estimates that the combined revenue of groups that opposed the confirmation approaches $50 million, failing to note the much larger total for the judge's supporters. According to the most recent information available from Guidestar.com, Concerned Women for America brought in $11,032,216 in 2001 and the American Center for Law and Justice, $12,156,744. In 2000, Coral Ridge Ministries had $42,417,532 in revenue and Focus on the Family, $128,805,413. Other Pickering boosters' 2000 revenues: American Family Association, $11,460,446; Family Research Council, $10,045,855; Eagle Forum, $2,320,060; Free Congress Foundation, $2,680,004. In other words, Mr. York's attempt to portray the Pickering battle as a David-and-Goliath struggle is way off base. And that's not including the priceless bully pulpit of the White House, which President Bush is now using to campaign for Senate candidates who will support his judicial nominees.

To suggest that the well-organized and richly funded right-wing political movement is not engaged in a long-term strategic effort to gain ideological domination over the federal judiciary is to ignore both recent history and current frenzied activity. In fact, this movement has been actively engaged in judicial-nomination battles for many years, including successful efforts to prevent many Clinton circuit-court nominees from getting a committee hearing or Senate vote. Indeed, right-wing senators blocked 35 percent of Clinton's circuit- court nominees from 1995 to 2000.

The future of the federal judiciary is a struggle of monumental importance. The sustained campaign to overturn the constitutional framework of the past 65 years and roll back decades of legal and civil-rights achievements is nearer to completion than ever before. It is the success of the right wing's campaign for control of the judiciary, and the far-reaching consequences for Americans' rights and freedoms, that have compelled action by broad coalitions of organizations concerned with civil and constitutional rights, women's rights, environmental protections, and much more.

With all that at stake, it is imperative that we have a broader national debate about the Constitution and the judiciary. I hope that National Review's future contributions to the debate will be more solidly grounded in reality.

Ralph G. Neas, President

People for the American Way

Washington, D.C.

--Byron York replies: Start with what Mr. Neas does not address in his letter. My central argument was that People for the American Way and other liberal interest groups worked closely with Senate Democrats to kill the Pickering nomination, serving as the "de facto research arm" of Democrats whose actions "closely tracked demands made by the coalition." The story presented evidence detailing People for the American Way's intensive research on Pickering, showing how the group requested court documents that no other group, left or right, had seen. The piece also highlighted a case in which a Democratic senator used information to question Pickering that could only have come from People for the American Way.

Mr. Neas disputes none of that. Instead, he argues that the Right did the same thing. His sole evidence is that Sen. Orrin Hatch used the word "lynching" to describe the attack on Pickering, the same word a conservative group had used two days earlier. That's not exactly an air-tight case. While the word was clearly excessive when Hatch said it, it wasn't exactly new; Mr. Neas may remember that one of his earlier targets, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, famously used it in a confirmation context more than a decade ago.

Mr. Neas then argues that there was a rich and powerful conservative coalition fighting on Pickering's behalf. That is simply not the case. While there are indeed rich and powerful groups on the right, none of them did anything for Pickering that even remotely resembled the work that Mr. Neas did against him. For example, the Concerned Women for America ads ran on March 12 and 13, just before the committee vote on Pickering -- and a time at which the nomination had long been considered dead. Similarly, the Family Research Council's "Daschle Detainees" ad ran in South Dakota in the last week of February and the first week of March -- also far too late to help Pickering. The same could be said for the groups' press releases. In any event, conservative groups did none of the comprehensive opposition research that Mr. Neas's staff engaged in so effectively.