Letters to the EditorFamilies Matter
Clive Crook’s assessment of dime-a-day slum schools in India (“The Ten-Cent Solution,” March Atlantic) is marred by an error common to noneducators. Students enrolled in these schools constitute a self-selected group. Parents who exercise school choice are, by definition, already involved in their children’s education, and studies have repeatedly underscored the crucial role that parental involvement plays in educational outcomes. Not surprisingly, therefore, test scores will be higher in such schools. The slum schools that Crook describes deserve high praise for their accomplishments, but the test results he cites are contaminated. Walt Gardner Our Enemy, The Cow
Your item on “The Bovine Menace“ (Primary Sources, March Atlantic) claims that “animal flatulence” is responsible for greenhouse-gas emissions. In fact, there is essentially no methane produced in such a manner. The methane of bovine origin, which does play a small part in global warming, is produced by fermentation in the rumen and is “burped” through the mouth. Henry A. Fribourg After stating that “livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions,” your Primary Sources item cites deforestation and the fossil fuels used to manufacture livestock fertilizer as two big contributors to the whole mess. Do you mean the livestock or the livestock industry? Because if you have photos of livestock running the earthmoving equipment doing the deforestation, then you have yourself a scoop! Tom Sacco The Editors reply: We meant the industry, alas. And although flatulence does produce some methane, we appreciate Henry Fribourg’s pointing out that more is produced through burping. All The Presidents’ Lies
Carl Cannon’s article “Untruth and Consequences” (January/February Atlantic) fails to answer the implied question in the magazine’s cover line (“Why Presidents Lie”). Here’s one idea: Presidents lie because, as Richard Neustadt wrote, their chief power is that of persuasion. They are salesmen for policies. Incentives to avoid obvious falsehood exist—believability for the next sale, for starters—but when the public is not paying close attention, the benefits of lying outweigh the costs. In this light, George W. Bush’s mendacity is not different in kind but in ambition from that of other presidents. The Bush administration does not simply lie; it erects edifices of dishonesty and assails those who endanger them. Along with lies about weapons of mass destruction—a silly term that enabled war boosters to use the relatively uncontroversial contention that Iraq had chemical weapons to imply that Iraq would soon have nuclear weapons—the administration falsely claimed that Baathist Iraq worked with al-Qaeda; it denied the existence of the Iraqi insurgency for months; it has consistently exaggerated the role of jihadists like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in an Iraqi revolt dominated by Sunni tribes; it has reliably overstated the progress of the Iraqi military and government. All this and more, to sell a war. This litany of dishonesty makes it deeply discouraging to see Cannon suggest that had WMD been found in Iraq, posterity would not consider Bush dishonest. If this is so, it is a stunning indictment of historians’ objectivity. I am not yet so pessimistic. Benjamin H. Friedman Carl M. Cannon replies: Benjamin Friedman imputes “pessimistic” impulses to me for asserting that American public opinion would not be so unfavorable toward President Bush had chemical and biological weapons been found in Iraq. I’d say this is realism, not pessimism. To Friedman’s main point, I’d add this: Caches of biological and chemical weapons were not discovered in Iraq, but prior to the war even the most principled opponents of the Iraq invasion did not openly doubt their existence. There is some evidence that their absence surprised even Saddam Hussein. The more salient question in this regard is why the Bush administration was so slow to admit the absence of such weapons long after it was clear they weren’t around. The Roberts Court
I believe that Jeffrey Rosen misunderstands John Roberts’s concept of collegiality (“Roberts’s Rules,” January/February Atlantic). The chief justice’s definition of collegiality, like the right-wing definition of bipartisanship, is to do it his way. The attempt to stifle dissent by discouraging differing opinions is part and parcel of this arrogance. Roberts’s intent to follow Chief Justice John Marshall is just as telling, as Marshall also mistrusted democracy and issued his judgments to make certain that those atop the natural order were protected from the rabble. James D. Colville Jeffrey Rosen replies: It is James Colville, I think, who misunderstands John Marshall’s vision, which John Roberts is trying to resurrect. There is nothing “right wing” in the effort to encourage a single unanimous opinion of the Court, rather than expressing separate, or seriatim, opinions, which was the traditional English model. When Thomas Jefferson railed against Marshall as a “crafty chief judge” who cowed “lazy or timid associates” into joining unanimous opinions “huddled up in conclave,” many of the unanimous decisions that he criticized (such as McCulloch v. Maryland, upholding the Bank of the United States) were supported by a majority of the nation’s citizens and opposed only by illiberal or self-interested local minorities. Furthermore, Roberts acknowledged that in order to resurrect Marshall’s vision, he would have to convince his liberal and conservative colleagues that narrow, unanimous opinions were in each of their long-term interests. Advice and Consent
James Watt should be identified as a Scottish inventor, not an “English inventor,” as he is in a caption in James Fallows’s “Mr. Zhang Builds His Dream Town” (March Atlantic). Watt was a native of my hometown, Greenock, Scotland. Margaret E. Minton The Editors reply: Margaret Minton is correct. We regret the error. James Fallows’s fascinating description of Broad Air Conditioning in “Mr. Zhang Builds His Dream Town” is marred by his faulty explanation of how Broad’s “nonelectric refrigeration” works. He states that the “nonelectric coolers … boil a special liquid, a lithium bromide solution, and when the vapors from that solution condense, they cool whatever is near them.” But evaporation (the opposite of condensation) is cooling, as is noted in the next paragraph, where Premier Wen Jiabao is approvingly quoted as saying, “Yes! Yes! For it evaporates and takes away the heat.” Marshall E. Deutsch James Fallows replies: In the Broad Company’s account of Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to their factory, the sentence following the one quoted by Marshall Deutsch declares: “The Premier is a specialist indeed.” Now we know why they didn’t say that after my visit. My apologies for the condensation/evaporation mix-up. Joshua Green’s article about Tim Gill (“They Won’t Know What Hit Them,” March Atlantic) states that in four states where Gill and his allies invested, control of at least one legislative chamber switched to the Democrats last November, and lists Washington as one state where that happened. However, Democrats already controlled both the Washington House and Senate. Carleen Pagni Joshua Green replies: Carleen Pagni is correct, and I regret the error. The four states were Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota.
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