Many people, including some of the brightest, have always objected to the term “War on Terror.” They say it’s too vague. I’ve always disagreed: When we say “War on Terror,” everyone knows whom and what we’re talking about.

Anyway, I thought of this dispute when reading remarks by President Bush last week. This was after the U.S. embassy in Yemen was attacked. Bush said, “This attack is a reminder that we are at war with extremists who will murder innocent people to achieve their ideological objectives. One objective of these extremists is to kill, to try to cause the United States to lose our nerve and to withdraw from regions of the world.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ADVERTISEMENT

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

That is, of course, exactly right. I’ve often wondered why Bush doesn’t give more press conferences — why he doesn’t do more “town halls,” etc. He’s supposed to be a bad communicator, but I have never agreed. He is sometimes a reluctant communicator.

I once asked Condi Rice why Bush didn’t give more press conferences. She said (I paraphrase), “You would say that, because you’re in the press.” Actually, I think it would do Bush and his administration a lot of good. The country and world, too.

Anyway . . .

On the Corner last week, I said something about Ramsey Clark. And Andy McCarthy sent me a grin-making note:

Jay,

Clark (along with the dreadful Lynne Stewart) represented the Blind Sheikh at our trial. [This was the trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers.] As a result, Ramzi Yousef, who was the mastermind behind the bombing, was known among us counterterrorism types as “the other Ramsey.”

Marvelous. And, speaking of marvelous, you can find Andy’s book Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad here.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the Bush Doctrine — because Sarah Palin was supposed to have been undone by it. (My eye.) I liked something a reader wrote: “With Russian warships being invited to South America, and nations there expelling our diplomats, are we worried about the wrong doctrine? Should we instead start thinking again about the Monroe?”

Longtime readers of this column know that I have strong views about Rep. Charles Rangel of New York. He is one of Fidel Castro’s best friends in the Free World. He is not merely an apologist for Castro. He is an ardent advocate of him, if you appreciate the distinction. It’s not just that he makes excuses for him. He champions him.

Rarely have Free World officeholders been so staunch for a brutal dictator.

And everyone loves him — Rangel, that is. (Many love Castro, too.) “Good ol’ ‘Chollie,’” they say — quick with a quip, every journalist’s pet. Even some conservatives have fallen for his act.

You have heard what he said when asked about Gov. Sarah Palin: “You got to be kind to the disabled.” (Read about this here.)

I could write for pages about this, but let me pose two questions: If a conservative Republican said the same about a Democratic vice-presidential nominee, would he be able to remain in public life? And second: How can conservatives have discussions with liberals, when this is the way they think and talk about us?

Many people mind that Rangel — the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee — is a big-time tax cheat. I mind that he’s a moral skunk.

You know that, last week, Joe Biden praised higher taxes as patriotic. You may also remember that Rangel has long denounced tax cuts as . . . racist. But of course. He once said, “It’s not ‘spic’ or ‘nigger’ anymore. They say, ‘Let’s cut taxes.’”

What a beaut, “Chollie” Rangel. And you will not find a more beloved politician among the Washington press corps, unless, of course, he is Barack Obama.

Last Thursday, on the Corner, I posted two notes about Sarah Palin. (You can find them here and here.) I asked, “Why the hatred directed against her? Why the filth poured over her head? Why the naked rage?” I further asked, “Is she done, through? Has what we might broadly call ‘the Left’ succeeded in stigmatizing her, tarring her, forever — the way they did Bork, Quayle, and Thomas?”

These notes drew many reader responses — about 300 of them. I’m sorry I will not have time to answer them all, or even read them all. Many of them are interesting, insightful, anguished, moving. Many tell of personal encounters with Palin-haters (as one of my Corner notes did).

I’d like to provide, here, just a little sampling of the reaction. Many people wrote about the hacking into Palin’s e-mail — but more than that, about the relative media indifference to it. It seems to me that the “MSM” basically yawned. Would they have done the same if Obama’s e-mail had been stolen and disseminated?

You remember “Passportgate” from 1992. That was a very, very big deal. Of course, when Clinton appointees at the Defense Department leaked classified information from Linda Tripp’s national-security file — that was no big deal. And this was the very violation for which Charles Colson went to jail (as he, among others, reminded me). (I spent a good part of 1998, 1999, and 2000 reporting and writing on such matters.)

Have a reader letter: “The same liberals who become apoplectic at the thought that some CIA/NSA cube-dweller may be sifting through Osama bin Laden’s e-mail without a warrant are perfectly blasé about what happened to Palin. How can that be? Would the waterboarding of Sarah be okay, too?”

That could be a real quandary.

Here’s another reader letter: “When Sarah Palin found out that her e-mail account had been compromised, she closed it. That sounds like the logical thing to do. But the website that posted her stolen mail called that action an attempt to ‘destroy evidence.’ So you see, the bad guy in this situation is Palin, not the hackers.” Well, of course — didn’t we all know that?

I have written a fair amount about Palin-hate and abortion — and this letter caught my eye: “I’ve been sitting and working this morning at a gathering place on the Rice University campus. Sitting at a table a few feet away, two women are chatting. The conversation turns to Sarah Palin. They both hate her. She will do away with abortion, with birth control, she is a creationist, a book-banner. But they keep coming back to abortion.”

At the end of his letter, this correspondent says, “[All this] is enough to make me despair. And to think that the America of my imagination is no longer the real America. Maybe it never was.”