Ognibene All Talk, Says Rival

Before everyone starts jumping on the Thomas Ognibene for mayor bandwagon, I’d like to point out a couple of things [“Revolt in Rockaway,” John P. Avlon, Opinion, January 18, 2005]. Previously, Mr. Ognibene had said he was running for mayor in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004, and now again in 2005. While he keeps talking about running, he has yet to lift a finger or raise a nickel to further his candidacy. Quite simply, he is the candidate who cried wolf. On the other hand, I have dedicated nearly every spare hour of my life for the last 18 months to my mayoral campaign. I have developed a platform, recruited volunteers, raised money, and launched my campaign website.

I will continue to work night and day on my campaign because I believe New York City must move in an entirely different direction than the one being promulgated by the tax-and-spend Bloomberg administration. To win the campaign will require the candidate to be a man of action, which is what I represent. Mr. Ognibene, in contrast, represents the candidate of talk.

STEVE SHAW
Republican Candidate for Mayor
Brooklyn, NY

Diplomats Are Partisan, Too

Re: [“Early Clues at State,” Opinion, January 19, 2005]. According to Richard Holbrooke, so far Dr. Rice has “opted primarily for outstanding career diplomats and professionals, not ideologues or partisan political appointments.” Because we know that Holbrooke is a “career diplomat” and by some magic alchemy this makes him immune from ideologies and the very strong feelings about values that go with them.

In the first Fallujah confrontation, who were counseling compromise with the shaky Sunni group and who were arguing to fight on and take the city completely after winning a third of the city? The arguments from the so-called nonideologues at the time said that a total invasion of the city would touch off a holy war engulfing all of Iraq. Well the city has now been taken and no civil or holy war has broken out.

DAVID M. O’NEILL
Adjunct professor of economics
Hunter College
City University of New York

Professors’ Acts Hypocritical

R. Emmett Tyrell Jr. notes that some liberal professors walked out in protest and became physically convulsed [“What I Suspected All Along,” Opinion, January 20, 2005]. Why? Because Harvard President Lawrence Summers simply repeated the suggestion – made by others – that perhaps innate differences between men and women were part of the equation that accounts for the differences in performance between the sexes in mathematics and the sciences. These liberals attacked Mr. Summers in the most personal terms.

I cannot help but contrast that reaction to the way liberals, such as the attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union and some professors at Columbia, frame the debate over the statements and behavior in the classroom of some anti-Israel professors in the Middle East Studies Department at Columbia University. No matter how outrageous and factually untrue or unbalanced the statements of these anti-Israel professors are, no matter how much they intimidate students who challenge this classroom propaganda, liberals frame the issue as one of freedom of speech and as an attack on academic freedom.

HARRY J. REIDLER
Englewood, N.J.

Buckley, Bush Praised

William Buckley’s characteristically scintillating review [“Regarding World War IV,” Opinion, January 19, 2005] is a delight, not only for a fundamentally sound perspective on our administration’s international policy, but also as a veritable treasure of quotes worth preserving from President George W. Bush and Commentary essayist Norman Podhoretz.

Of the issues tackled, regime change is one of the most critical. We have repeatedly heard, here and abroad, that this should not be America’s job nor its right. The critics invoking this argument have, for so long, enjoyed freedom’s luxury that they have never heard of, much less thought of, Sharansky’s “townsquare test” – “If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his of her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, and physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society.”

But Mr. Bush’s quote says it best: “For decades, free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability and much oppression, so I have changed this policy.”

What about Saudi Arabia?

DEBORAH BENNETT
Flushing, N.Y.

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