NAY TO NATO

THANKS to Max Boot for his concise and perceptive analysis of NATO's nebulous ability to respond to the real-life military needs of Afghanistan ("Proactive Self-Defense," July 3 / July 10). Who can doubt that NATO will quickly begin crumbling as member nations start pulling troops out if any end up attacked and killed by Islamist forces, once NATO fully invests itself in the turbulent southern region?

NATO is in no way ready to respond to attacks on the ground, nor, with its many prohibitive rules, is it even agile enough to do so. Boot couldn't be more right not to be "sanguine" about their probable success. And who else but a man who reads too much 19th-century history would use the word "sanguine" so well, anyway?

WARNER TODD HUSTON
Chicago, Ill.

BLOG-VIATING

REGARDING Matt Labash's playful, amusing, and generally accurate "Riding with the Kossacks" (June 26): As a blogger (albeit one who rarely reads Daily Kos), I can acknowledge that the majority of the blogosphere--not just Kos--tends to draw in like-minded thinkers and posters in order to create something of an "amen corner" for their particular subjects. But are blog readers much different from the majority of people who choose to listen to Rush Limbaugh or NPR, to watch Bill O'Reilly or Michael Moore, or to read the New Republic or THE WEEKLY STANDARD?

In each of these instances, the average listener, viewer, or reader is likely to share the fundamental assumptions of the programs he watches and the publications he reads. Whether we like it or not, most human beings simply prefer to have their preconceived notions about the world continuously confirmed, rather than challenged.

BOBBY BRAN
Orange County, Calif.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI's "Betting on the Bloggers" (June 26) quotes Sen. Harry Reid as saying that bloggers are an "unstoppable force." In truth, though, I think the blogosphere is not quite all it's made out to be. Within their limited, online world, bloggers and their readers accept opinions as truths whose import increases with repeated cycles of observation, analysis, and bloviation. To the blogger, a spattering of like-minded correspondents feels like a vast audience.

Bloggers resemble a group of people trading Pokémon cards among themselves, driving up the card values, not realizing that they themselves are the source of inflation and that outside the group the cards are not worth the value of the paper stock they are printed on. Most of us, at least for the time being, go about our day with little notice paid to the blogosphere.

DAVID J. HINN
Houston, Tex.

POETIC BRIEFS

AARON MACLEAN's review of "The Ode Less Travelled" by Stephen Fry has unlocked my inner poet ("Bad to Verse," June 26). While poring over the parody in the same issue, I noticed a spelling error in "Apocalypse NEA," purportedly composed by Donald Hall, poet laureate. You wrote, "Never again! will Mapplethorpe's / Entwinèd men perspire on the / Rough-hewn sheets of flowerbeds / And taunt the prosecutor's brief." In the original, I believe, the last line read, "and taunt the prosecutor's briefs."

ELIAS YOUNG
Delta, Colo.