"NOW believes that Rush Limbaugh is truly a dangerous man," the letter says. "We need the help of every progressive person to expose the hateful, divisive fanaticism of Rush Limbaugh." Feminists are exhorted to pressure radio stations and advertisers to cut off support for Limbaugh, who is called a "dangerous bigot" spewing forth "reactionary rhetoric" and "venom," linked to the "messages of intolerance and violence that dominate television."

"It's astonishing that Rush Limbaugh gets so much air time" with his "hate-filled show," the letter fumes -- without acknowledging that it's Limbaugh's massive populist appeal that sustains his show in the cutthroat world of commercial media. This letter, signed by Patricia Ireland, the president of NOW, eloquently demonstrates how feminist leaders in the U.S. have damaged and marginalized the women's movement, one of the great, progressive products of the Enlightenment.

Rush Limbaugh is a principled conservative, master broadcaster and stinging social critic who has won his mammoth following through his own energy, individualism and wit. His daily radio show is the one reliable place ordinary citizens can turn to for a different perspective in the blizzard of propaganda and disinformation from the Northeastern media establishment. History will show that Limbaugh was a major force over the past decade in waking this country up from its p.c. coma.

Corrections department: Dozens of readers complained that I wrongly called Ralph Nader the only presidential candidate who opposed the wasteful war on drugs. They point out that Harry Browne of the Libertarian Party also took that position. I apologize for carelessness of phrasing: I was simply trying to show why I was voting for Nader rather than Gore.

Two readers requested clarification of my account of a spectacular play in the Minnesota Vikings-Green Bay Packers game. Coni Bourin notes that Antonio Freeman's miracle catch was even more miraculous than I had described it:

The ball didn't land on his chest because he was lying on his tummy. It landed on his back, which made the actual catch all the more unbelievable. He had to have felt it there and rolled over to grab it before it rolled off him. Then he bobbled it a little before securing it in his hands. He realized he was never touched, stood up and ran into the end zone.

Writing from Lawrenceville, Ga., Richard A. Sutton spotlights the behavior of the defending cornerback:

Dishman didn't just run past the play. As soon as he touched the ball and knocked Freeman down, he started his celebration and turned toward the side lines so his dance could be better appreciated by the crowd and the television audience. He joins in glory another Viking from the 1960s who, headed for the end zone all alone, started his celebration too early and exuberantly spiked the ball on the five yard line. A player from the other team recovered the ball.

Rechavia Berman, a spokesman for the Green Leaf Party of Israel, sent a most interesting message from Tel Aviv protesting that my criticism of rocket strikes by Israeli helicopter gunships (as shown on American TV) erred in calling Ramallah a "village":

Ramallah is not a "village" by any definition or stretch of the imagination. It is a large city of over 100,000 people and is the West Bank seat of the Palestinian Authority.

We in Israel can't really help it if the balance of power in our region seems a bit unsportsmanlike to detached spectators such as yourself. This ain't no football game, and we sleep a hell of a lot better at night with our superior firepower than we would have without it. Tell me, are they showing the nightly shooting practice that the Tanzim militia has been conducting on the Jewish Jerusalem neighborhood of Giloh from the Palestinian Jerusalem village of Beit Jallah? I'm talking about live ammunition being fired night in and night out at residential homes.

Let's imagine, for a second, that some border town in the southern U.S. was getting shot at each and every night for two weeks from a Mexican border town, and you tell me how long that border town would still be in one piece. And when Israeli forces are deployed -- usually with remarkable restraint, I may add -- it reminds you of "The War of the Worlds." Well, I have just one thing to say: If a man runs into a brick wall on purpose and at full speed and breaks his head, that doesn't necessarily mean that the brick wall is at fault.

I happen to be a left winger who does not believe Israel to be faultless at all in this latest crisis, just so you don't make things easy for yourself by casting me as some racist settler.

I'm grateful to friends in Provincetown, Mass., the writers Roger Skillings and Heidi Jon Schmidt, for sending along an excerpt from Academic Questions as reprinted in the autumn issue of the Wilson Quarterly. It's by John M. Ellis, professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz:

At long last there is widespread talk of a crisis in literary studies, and yet in a kind of displacement the hand-wringing is directed not to the real problem but to one of its side effects -- that there are almost no college teaching jobs available for new Ph.D.s. When supply dwarfs demand, the question arises, is the problem mainly one of demand, or of supply?

Everyone talks only about supply -- that is, too many people in graduate school -- and nobody ever faces the dreaded possibility that the crisis is really one of reduced demand. Yet it should be obvious that demand is the problem. If undergraduates were majoring in English at the rate of 30 years ago, their numbers would be about 60 percent greater than they actually are today. The supply of Ph.D.s would then be hopelessly inadequate to meet the demand for new professors of English.

The real source of the crisis must therefore lie in the fact that undergraduates are not attracted to what college literature programs now offer them. The college literature establishment professes sympathy for its hapless graduate students but is not prepared to do the one thing that might help them -- and that is to think again about the mix of identity politics and postmodern dogma that has made English and related departments intellectually uncompetitive.

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