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

This is funny. Instead of finding out what Donald Trump's supporters like about him and asking the other Republican presidential candidates to make appropriate changes in their policies so as to get those votes, the Republican National Committee is trying to throw him out of the party. What is it with these morons? They've put up two consecutive losers, John McCain and Mitt Romney, and they seem determined to put up a third. Donald Trump is the only person out there who can save the party (from itself) and win the presidency. Sometimes I think Republicans want to lose. They prefer sniping to leading. Leadership is hard; sniping is easy.

Mort Künstler, "Custer's Last Stand" (1986).

This blog had 4,984 visits during August, which is an average of 160.7 visits per day. A year ago, the average was 152.6.

Here.

Here.

To the Editor:

Reading “Democrats See an Email Issue That Won’t Die” (front page, Aug. 28), I was suddenly struck that Hillary Rodham Clinton was very clear about the matter when it first arose, many political cycles ago. She explained, simply and clearly, that the reason she used her private server rather than the State Department system was that she did not want the inconvenience of having to carry and use more than one cellphone.

So, her judgment was to ignore the legal structure put in place to safeguard official State Department information in favor of her personal convenience.

BARRY SPIKINGS

West Hollywood, Calif.

To the Editor:

John Morgan, a Clinton donor and trial lawyer, is quoted as saying, “This is not a time to parse words.”

Has Mr. Morgan forgotten “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”?

Parsing words is what the Clintons always do when caught. Why expect Mrs. Clinton to act any differently?

GERALD KATZ

Potomac, Md.

Note from KBJ: I'm shocked that the New York Times published these letters. That doesn't bode well for Hillary Clinton, the most corrupt woman in public life.

I agree with this. If you're a public official, you must comply with the law. If you can't, even for respectable religious reasons, you must resign or see to it that someone else performs your duties. Things are different for private individuals, such as bakers, photographers, and wedding planners. These people have not sworn to carry out the law. If they have a sincere religious opposition to homosexual "marriage," they may withhold their services with impunity.

Many people think philosophy should be practical and relevant, but this is taking things too far.

Because what we need is a demonstrated loser.

As an advocate of dynamic societies, I believe in the market economy and the free-enterprise system. I particularly value the social mobility that economic dynamism makes possible. Indeed, I am a beneficiary of that social mobility. A bit over a hundred years ago, my immigrant grandfathers—one from southern Italy, the other from Syria—were coal miners. Neither had so much as remotely considered the possibility of attending a university; as a practical economic matter, such a thing was simply out of the question. At that time, Woodrow Wilson, the future president of the United States, was the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton. Today, just two generations forward, I, the grandson of those immigrant coal miners, am the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton. And what is truly remarkable is that my story is completely unremarkable. Something like it is the story of millions of Americans. Perhaps it goes without saying that this kind of upward mobility is not common in corporatist or socialist economic systems. It is very common in market-based free-enterprise economies.

(Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism, American Ideals and Institutions Series, ed. Robert P. George [Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2013], 11)