Letters.

• Position: Letter to the Editor

Party Poopers

Nicholas Thompson huffs and puffs, but he can't make much out of Republican moderates ("Extremism in the Defense of Moderation," May 2001). No matter how you slice it, Jim Jeffords, Sweet Suzy, the Big O, and Lincoln Chaffee do not remind anybody of Teddy Roosevelt. Republican moderates have been followers rather than leaders, and that's been the case at least since the heyday of Everett Dirksen, Gerald Ford, and Bob Michel. Instead of proposing and fighting for a centrist vision, they try to adjust liberal and conservative ideas at the margins. "A little bit more of this" "A little less of that" "Can't we do this a little differently?" "Can't a little bit more of this pork go to MY constituents?" That's the message of Republican moderation whether they are responding to Democratic liberals or Republican conservatives. It isn't much of a message. Moderates don't pursue it with much passion. Oddly enough, the electorate is probably more comfortable with the apolitical, anti-ideological shaving of the moderates than with the ferocity of someone like Tom DeLay or Maxine Waters. However, as Teddy Roosevelt might have said, timidity doesn't get the job done in politics any more than it does in real life.

RIC N. CARIC Morehead, Ky. Life of the Party

Congratulations on a great article ("Extremism in the Defense of Moderation," May 2001). A solid analysis of recent (and not-so-recent) American political history, it said what I have been groping to articulate ever since the Reagan years about the very definitions of "liberal" and "conservative" A lifelong conservative Republican, a former member of Young Americans for Freedom, a GOP precinct captain, manager of a number of local GOP campaigns, and volunteer ad nauseum, I was astonished to find that the "wing-nuts" had taken over my party, "pulled my stencil" and were vilifying me and those like me with venom spewed by the likes of Ann Coulter.

Your piece put it all back into a perspective I can live with, and reinforced my instinct that it was not my beliefs that had changed, but rather that the terms had been redefined out from under me.

MIMI MADDEN Washington, D.C. Wrong Hide

Your summary of weapons of mass destruction civil support team (CST) response times is reasonably accurate and, in fact, you identify the fundamental problems associated with their existence. ("Weapons of Mass Confusion," May 2001.) You have, however, completely misidentified the cause and instigator of their...