Mailbag

Our post on the “Mothers’ Index” put out by Save the Children drew a lot of mail. For those who missed it, here it is. Reader Brian Carnell adds that infant mortality statistics are also unfair to the U.S., because the U.S. leads the world in saving premature infants, and even very premature infants are counted as live births even when they die very quickly. This is different from the practice in most countries.
I wrote that everyone except maybe Mark Steyn seems to accept that bin Laden is still alive. Dafydd ab Hugh, a persistent skeptic, begs to differ: “The only ‘evidence’ that Osama Bin Laden is still alive is chatter in the intelligence pipeline–chatter and a couple of audiotapes (not video), at least one of which was extensively analyzed by a well-known Swiss audio laboratory and pronounced a fake….Arrayed against this ‘evidence’ of Bin Laden continuing to suck air, we have his total absence from videotape (still unexplained) since December of 2001; we have the fact that virtually nobody available for cross examination even claims to have seen Bin Laden since then, except for one captured operative (and we don’t know what he says now, only what he said the day he was captured); we have the complete dissolution of the command and control of Al Qaeda; we have the inability of Al Qaeda to mount any sort of response to the lightning quick overthrowing of Saddam Hussein….”
And reader Allen Thorpe gets the last word on Bill Bennett: “Why didn’t he just put it in his 401(k)? Nobody would have blamed him for losing it that way.” Amen.

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