Jonah Goldberg is still getting it all wrong

Re “Right invasion, wrong explanation,” Opinion, March 23

How many times do we have to explain it to Jonah Goldberg? Of course we didn’t know for sure that Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. But we sure didn’t know that he did, did we? A prudent, or even intelligent, president would have waited for more evidence -- and so spared us a catastrophe that can only bring pain to those who truly love America.

JOHN MCCUMBER

Los Angeles

*

I can’t tell you how delighted I am that Goldberg called White House correspondent Helen Thomas a “thespian carbuncle of bile” for daring to pose a discomfiting question during Tuesday’s presidential news conference, because he abandons, in his first sentence, any pretense that his is anything other than a hatchet job on Thomas and most of the Washington press corps. Never mind that it’s a question that, according to recent polls, is likely on the minds of a majority of Americans.

Goldberg does, finally, get down to the tangential matter of absolving President Bush of any blame in the rush into Iraq and the thousands of deaths that have been its consequence. In attacking Thomas and her journalist colleagues, Goldberg makes it clear that he is no journalist; if he were, he’d probably retain some memory of H.L. Mencken’s definition of a journalist’s job: to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.

A.L. HERN

Los Angeles

*

It’s amazing that Goldberg could write a whole column on WMD without once using the word “inspections.” His analogy of the unloaded gun fails because the cop (the weapons inspectors) patted down Hussein and found he was unarmed. Bush shot a blustering but harmless old fool, not a desperado pointing a weapon at him.

ROB SCHMIDT

Culver City