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Although I did search for this article, I just noticed that this was posted last week. I apologize, but I would still like to hear what others think of this book.

One of Buchanan's main theses is that the schools are polluting our children. Sadly, I've seen that it is true. Over and over I've had to correct my children when they come home spouting some nonsense. Year after year I have to send articles debunking subjects from Nuclear War to Global Warming. Is there any way out other than making our own way through private and home schooling?

Buchanan's right -- they are polluting our children. We're getting ready to head into the holiday season (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day) at my sons' parochial school. Last year about this time my kindergarten son and I were sitting in traffic when we saw a billboard with MLK's picture on it. Just for fun, I asked him who he thought it might be. His response: "That's Martin Luther King -- he saved the world."

Too bad Jesus didn't rate such a mention during the Christmas season just past (oops -- I probably should have said "holiday season".) Our supposedly Catholic school had a holiday program in which I don't believe that Jesus's name was mentioned even once. We did get a rousing number about Kwanzaa though.

As a result of these experiences, a couple of things are beginning to dawn on me. First, the so-called Catholic schools stopped being Catholic when they stopped having priests and nuns as teachers (there's not a single one at my children's school -- nor is there any at any other "Catholic" school in my allegedly conservative diocese. Instead of nuns and priests as teachers, we have ill-formed laywomen who wouldn't recognize the Catholic Catechism is someone handed it to them.

Second, that what is left of the Catholicism in our Catholic schools is being relentlessly watered down to the point that the schools are merely secular private schools with a Catholic name affixed. For example, these past two weeks I've been battling the announcement that during Lent this year, the kids will have the option of eating meat. Now to a non-Catholic this is probably a small thing -- and in truth it is, but it represents a larger truth: that whatever that is Catholic that is left in these schools is being relentlessly purged. So I have to ask myself, "What is Catholic about a Catholic school that has none of the usual pious customs and a watered-down, slapped-together religious instruction that is essentially non-denominational?" Not much, it would seem.

One of the things you can do is get your kids out of their brainwashing camps. Visit www.sepschool.org.

With regard to the title of the piece, Pat is spot on. As he is about nearly everything else. Among the lessons that were lost by 9/11 is the fact that we can't keep whistling past the moral boneyard. We can invoke "god" till we're blue in the face, but until we are willing to clean up our own homes, we are weak as a nation.

"The intimidators failed with Clarence Thomas but succeeded with some conservatives who, like defeated peoples, no longer make demands. They just want to get along. But, in a culture war, where the other side is always making demands, and the other side is always ready to fight, this translates into endless retreats and eventual defeat.”

Mr. Bush wants to get along (I'm a "uniter", not a divider) and the big goob, big tenters accept the status quo.