Letters

A pox on mewling wusses who can't spell

Regarding your stunningly misguided "Rant" in the April 22 edition: There you go again with your broad generalizations and specious reasoning. My resentment of subsidizing the ever-expanding, hyper-repressive state has nothing to do with the blowhard Limbaugh. Not everyone in the anti-tax faction takes their cues from Rush, just as they don't all buy their wardrobe at Wal-Mart or consume "Little Debbie dinner items." My God, what an elitist prick you must be in real life!

I drive on the roads because I helped pay for them, whether I like it or not. Am I not to call the fire department when my house is burning down because I resent paying taxes? What about the homes that surround mine, now in imminent danger of igniting due to my standing strictly on principle? Am I not to call the cops when I witness a crime in progress, simply because I resent paying taxes to fund the burgeoning police state and all of its adjuncts, i.e., the ineffectual, racist and overtly pious War on Some Drugs?

When the pro-tax, statist nannies get on my nerves, I try to remember that they aren't ALL mewling, Big Brother-loving pussies that spell "Jeff" with a "G."

--Matthew Bryan

Film critic uses review to rant against Mormons

Because I'm Mormon, people often ask if their opinions or lifestyles offend me. No, I tell them. You and I are both just trying to make the best life we can with what we know. The only thing that offends me is willful ignorance.

Jeanette Catsoulis's review of The Best Two Years in your April 22 issue deeply offended me.

This movie review was little more than an excuse for Ms. Catsoulis to rant against Mormons, with such irrelevant diatribes as "the Mormon female's Prime Directive seems to be to pair off and procreate" and "the wonder of cult founder Joseph Smith."

Your paper's predisposition to hate all things Mormon is obvious in your double standards: The Two Best Years has "only [one] cast member with an acting pedigree" but for the recently released Latter Days, about a rebellious gay missionary, you stressed that it was an "indie filmfest fave."

The Book of Mormon Movie, which your reviewer didn't even see, was dismissed as a "quasi-historical invasion," yet you called The Magdalene Sisters the second best movie of 2003 because "if you weren't completely turned off by organized religion before, you probably will be after seeing this movie."

Is that the difference between a good movie and a bad movie? Not originality or style or power...but whether or not it makes religion look bad?

Apparently. Ms. Catsoulis only once addresses the merits of The Two Best Years in her review (calling the plot "thinly written"), but gleefully begins her tirade by calling the film "a promotional ad for the Mormon faith disguised as [a] movie."

I would call it entertainment for a target audience (you know, a movie), but you're welcome to disagree. However, Ms. Catsoulis, the next time you want to spew poison at people who are different from you, don't insult us further by "disguising" it as a movie review.

--Jamie Huston

Editor's note: The Mercury has no "predisposition to hate all things Mormon," but we'll admit that our film critics have a predisposition to hate all bad movies.

FBI must reform culture at the top

As the administrator for the FBI Whistleblowers website, www.fbiwhistlestop.com, I can dissect the FBI's "problems" with a very short phrase, much shorter than George Knapp's commentary ["Politicians, not FBI Agents, Should Take 9/11 Heat," April 22]. It is the culture. The FBI does not need more money, more talented people, more equipment, more power or anything else to truly change. The FBI needs to change its culture, that is, change a culture that rewards managers when they spend their time protecting the FBI's reputation, the FBI's "turf," and their fellow managers.

It is a culture that is brutish in its treatment of FBI agents who reveal misconduct or malfeasance by fellow agents. It is a culture that spends a large amount of time and energy to keep anyone from "tarnishing" a carefully cultivated image, when behind the curtain, every employee of the FBI knows that the FBI "shoots their wounded," and with great care and attention, neutralizes any employee who tries to bring misconduct and/or malfeasance to light.

To paraphrase a former president, "It's the culture, stupid." And as one of the first female FBI agents to come through the Las Vegas office in 1978, I think Mr. Knapp should know that since the bureau went coed in 1972, the moniker "G-men" does not really apply. Nor does the notion that "politicians" have been "cutting the balls off the agents they are in charge of." That really, Mr. Knapp, is not a big fear for several thousand FBI agents in today's FBI.

--Jane Turner,

FBI Special Agent,

Retired,

Twin Cities, Minn.

Pulling out of Iraq would make things worse

In the April 22 issue, Howard Zinn was interviewed on the subject of the Iraq war, and the article made yet another comparison to Vietnam. Zinn: "When it was obvious we weren't getting anywhere, we said, 'We mustn't cut and run, we must stick it out, we'll lose credibility, we've got to show the world we're not afraid.' Now the exact same argument is being made. `Well, if we pull out, there's going to be a bloodbath.' We pulled out in Vietnam and there was no bloodbath."

In fact the comparison is not good for the anti-war side, at least for those who actually know history. This quote from Victor Davis Hanson in National Review Online sums it up pretty well: "So, we can either press ahead in the face of occasionally bad news from Iraq--or we can withdraw. Then watch the entire three-year process of real improvement start to accelerate in reverse. If after 1975 we thought that over a million dead in Cambodia, another million on rickety boats fleeing Vietnam, another half-million sent to camps or executed, hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving in America, a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, an Iranian takeover of the U.S. embassy, oil-embargos, Communist entry into Central America, a quarter-century of continual terrorist attacks and national invective were bad, just watch the new world emerge when Saddam's Mafioso or Mr. Sadr's Mahdists force our departure."

Obviously the two men have widely different definitions of "bloodbath."

--James Gillen