Dear Editor,

Among the things that can make me nuts are attempts by leftist commentators on staffs of college newspapers to slip their agendas to the unwary young readership wrapped in a patina of unassailable knowledge – especially when that knowledge is really quite assailable by anyone who pays attention to just about anything.

To the staff of the University of South Florida’s “The Oracle,” I would like to point out that it’s Madeleine, not “Madeline,” Albright and that Clinton’s National Security Advisor was Sandy, not “Samuel,” Berger.

I don’t think 9/11 taught The Oracle’s”staff much of anything. If it had, they’d be questioning the testimony of Richard Clarke, not championing it.

Take their reporting that Clarke “…issued some sobering statements that may haunt the Bush re-election campaign…,” for instance.

One might – and should – question just how it is that Bush should be haunted when Mr. Clarke was on duty as the president’s terrorism advisor during a decade of attacks on the U.S. that resulted in no action whatever.

Clark reigned during the bombings of the World Trade Center in 1993, the barracks in Saudi Arabia, a U.S. embassy, the USS Cole, and other targets that took hundreds of lives; to which we gave no response, allowing al-Qaeda’s power to grow.

Just what was he “advising” during his tenure, and why should he be considered an authority now, when the obvious lesson of 9/11 was that he and his president were abysmal failures?

But failure seems to be the name of the game, for The Oracle also failed to do the fourth grade math required to see through the Albright/Berger smokescreen that December of 1999 was “the end of the Clinton presidency” and too late to take action. Mr. Goodtime had 13 more months in office, plenty of time to respond to these attacks, if he’d possessed even a fraction of the guts and concern for American lives our current president displays.

Dennis Fishel Freshman, anthropology