Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

To the Editor:

As we left a funeral the other day, I asked my uncle, a Catholic priest, what the bishops were doing about this election. I asked because I used to argue with my father about his votes for president.

“The bishops tell me my soul is in danger if I vote for a Democrat who supports abortion,” my father would say. “So it’s O.K. to vote for someone who believes in the death penalty but not abortion?” was my retort. The last Democrat he got to vote against was Bill Clinton. And my dad was a Democrat.

My uncle the priest told me that the bishops still believe that abortion is the gravest sin (he disagrees), but that this year they were telling their flocks to listen to their consciences.

Either these old men have finally seen a Republican too vile and repugnant to endorse, or the Nuns on the Bus have really won the hearts and minds of American Catholics.

ROBERT LAUGHLIN

Denver

Note from KBJ: You have to be preternaturally stupid to think that it is inconsistent to be opposed to abortion but in favor of capital punishment. Fetuses are innocent; convicted murderers are not.

Lights Out (1977). Rock and roll.

Here.

Here.

Why is there so much talk about Donald Trump's "problems" with female voters? Hillary Clinton has an even more serious "problem" with male voters. According to this tracking poll (which did the best of all polls in 2012), Trump bests Clinton among males, 48% to 34%, while Clinton bests Trump among females, 46% to 38%. Gee. I wonder why this is never reported. Could it be that only pro-Clinton news is reported? And why might that be? Is it possible that the mainstream media are in the bag for her? Duh.

To the editor:

As a British visitor in Southern California for a few weeks with family, I am avidly following the election campaign. Max Boot’s fine piece on Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s incendiary tweets should have examined further aspects of his record to establish his ideological closeness to Nazism. (“The Nazi echoes in Trump's tweets,” Opinion, Oct. 17)

Trump has boasted that he will “take out” the families of terrorists and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. He has declared that Mexico will be forced to pay for a wall to seal the border between the U.S. and Mexico.

Trump sees the law not as a judicial process but as an instrument of the state. He threatens to send his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, to jail, and he criticizes a judge’s ruling in the Trump University case because the judge has Mexican heritage. Most worrying of all, he insinuates that Clinton was wrong to do her duty as a lawyer in defending a rapist.

In a democracy, the exercise of the rule of law is not to be bent to the will of the leader of the state. Nor is the law there to punish those who do not love unreservedly the Trump-defined U.S., which appears to be Trump’s position. The Republican nominee is clearly not as evilly talented as Hitler, but we should not make the mistake, as many did with Hitler, of underestimating his threat to civilized life in the U.S. and the world.

Andrew McCulloch, Collingham, Great Britain

Note from KBJ: If Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler, then Hillary Clinton is Joseph Stalin. Hitler murdered 12 million people; Stalin murdered 15 million people. See here.

This man needs psychiatric help.

Addendum: Here is another sick puppy. What these individuals don't understand is that, by running Donald Trump down, they increase the likelihood that Hillary Clinton will be our next president, which undermines almost everything they've been working for during their adult lives. How is this not irrational? The only thing that can make it rational is if they get something for themselves that outweighs the harm done to their values, and what could that be except money or status; in which case, they are selling out the country they profess to love for personal aggrandizement. The only fitting punishment for this betrayal is to be cast out of the conservative movement. I hope people stop reading and listening to them.

Congratulations to the Chicago Cubs, who have reached the World Series for the first time since 1945. You'd have to be 81 years old to have an effective memory of the 1945 World Series. I do worry, though, that the Cubs and their fans are creating bad karma for themselves by celebrating so much. The baseball gods are not to be trifled with.

This is my boy Autie, who will be four years old on 5 December. He is named after George Armstrong Custer. Click to enlarge.