On 9/11 and adolescence.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI’S suggestion that September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows “staged a controversy” over the president’s use of 9/11 imagery in his political ads is at odds with reality (“How to Stage a Controversy,” March 22).

A recent USA Today poll showed that 66 percent of Americans agree with our position that it is inappropriate for political candidates to run campaign ads that use images depicting the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Instead of staging its own disingenuous “controversy” over the longstanding public goals of our advocacy group, THE WEEKLY STANDARD might better serve its readers by exploring the very real rejection by a majority of the public to the use of 9/11 images by political candidates of both parties.

David Potorti

September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows

Cary, NC

IN HIS EAGERNESS TO PORTRAY the Institute for Public Accuracy as the main catalyst for news about criticisms of how the Bush-Cheney campaign has used 9/11 in its TV commercials, Matthew Continetti was overly generous with his backhanded praise. Our small staff may be, as he wrote, a “group of people with excellent public relations skills,” but only an outsized institutional ego would allow us to take most of the credit for encouraging media coverage of the issue in early March.

Indeed, Continetti’s description of the IPA as having “a political axe to grind” is no more true of our organization than of, say, the Heritage Foundation. One of the differences, however–along with our relatively tiny budget and the fact that we’ve never helped write legislation on Capitol Hill–is that our mission involves helping to widen public discourse rather than further corporatizing and militarizing it. With more than 700 news releases since April 1998, we’ve worked to promote an array of progressive voices. Archived without revisions at www.accuracy.org, almost all of those news releases stand the test of time.

While the article noted in passing that IPA news releases scrutinized President Clinton during the 1999 war on Yugoslavia, the piece did not mention that the IPA has been consistently nonpartisan. This year our news releases have debunked factual misstatements and policy formulations by politicians including Howard Dean, John Edwards, and John Kerry.

The lengthy article’s conclusion–referring to “the Institute for Public Accuracy and the phony ‘controversy’ it managed to generate over the Bush campaign’s first round of television ads”–is incorrect on two counts. IPA’s news release on March 4 did not “generate” the controversy, which erupted due to many people’s genuine responses to the commercials. And the controversy was “phony” only if we believe that the heartfelt reactions from some loved ones of 9/11 victims are less equal than others.

Norman Solomon

Institute for Public Accuracy

San Francisco, CA

MATTHEW CONTINETTI’S EXCELLENT reporting elucidates the problems with the United States’s uncritical, left-leaning media. For example, why has no journalist questioned whether Senator Kerry, by mentioning his service in Vietnam at every campaign appearance, is “exploiting” that war and the many families who lost loved ones in it? Clearly Vietnam, like 9/11, is a sensitive, painful chapter in our country’s history. So why aren’t journalists asking questions about Kerry’s Vietnam War exploitation? Maybe because the Institute for Public Accuracy hasn’t sent them a press release on the subject yet.

Bernard Mulligan

Providence, RI

THREE CHEERS for Matthew Continetti’s “How To Stage a Controversy.” Such articles make clear that the events of September 11, 2001, do not belong solely to the relatives of those who perished that day. They belong to all of us.

Abe Novick

Baltimore, MD

Teen Dream

JOSEPH EPSTEIN’S “The Perpetual Adolescent” (March 15) does an excellent job of pointing out the negative aspects of our contemporary youth culture. Yet I found it troubling that Epstein failed to describe an intermediary between a “patience that often looks more like passivity” and the “adolescent impatience” he characterized as selfish. Thus, one must believe that no matter what steps today’s youth take in educational or employment opportunities, they are not on the path to “genuine accomplishment.”

Why is this so? It’s apparent that Epstein uses an “old model of ambition” that emphasizes delayed gratification and the idea that success must take a lifetime to achieve. What Epstein describes as “adolescent” is nothing but a new model of ambition and achievement.

Eric Oelrich

Collegeville, MN