i wrote him a letter about his column (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/08/opinion/08brooks.html?hp) which i'm sure will never get past his secretary:
My side aches...
...of raucous laughter.
I've enjoyed your columns for many years, even when I've disagreed with you (which was almost every time) but you have now, in my opinion, gone off a deep end of Mariana proportions.
"Dr." (of "Conservative Thought," even his title is an oxymoron lol!) Paul Wolfowitz, Champion of Freedom? oh, crap, i'll be back in a second...
Now my other side aches of puking.
The only freedom Wolfowitz has championed is Sam Walton's. It's certainly not that of Muslims. You do know that he handled negotiation of the conversion, into "free trade zones," of U.S. military bases in primarily Muslim Indonesia and the Philippines, right?
Oh, yeah, you will never have to work a factory floor so why should you care that the man helped set up what became the maquiladora system that crashed the wage economy world-wide? Are maquiladoras among the "sins" for which we should "absolve him," to use your terms?
You must, then, condone indentured servitude, which is the condition in which the workers of these "free" zones live: spending their pittance at the company store and the remainder on the rent of a bunk in the company barracks. You cats didn't end slavery, you just incorporated and exported it. "But why," you weep, "do they hate us for bringing them freedom?"
Most offensively, you insinuate that a hate for the work of Paul Wolfowitz makes one an anti-Semite - and just because that particular crassly imperialist neo-con happens to be Jewish? Up until now you've just irked me. Now I'm actively disgusted.
It's time to reestablish the frame "capitalist pig." Thanks for the assist.
the higher critic