Your points make sense to me. You're right, ambivalence and nuance can also lead to dangerous indecision. That's the other side of the coin, to be sure.

I understand your other reservations too, though I see things differently. To me, reaching out without preconditions is desirable because I believe in the core of my soul that peace can only be attained through peaceful behavior. Meetings are peaceful so I support them. But then, I am not afraid of Iran, per se. What I fear is not this state or that, but violence and war generally, whatever its source. I believe that our action in Iraq has stirred up so much animosity, fear, destruction, etc., that it's not our place to claim any kind of a moral high ground vis a vis other nations.

Trust has to be established and for that to happen, the US has to humble itself. I firmly believe this.

I think such behavior would go a long way to convincing the rest of the world's citizens (not the governments, but the regular people) that we weren't out to get them, exploit their resources, manipulate them to our advantage, etc.

I'm not afraid of a world in which there's more parity between the US and Iran. It poses a challenge, to be sure, but we have to learn to get along somehow. There's no hiding from that obligation or shirking it.

It has to be confronted head on.

Anyway, goodnight to you too, RC. It's nice we seem to be making progress: we're just coming from two very different places.

Goodnight to you too.

""But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change."

That's really what it comes down to, imo.

What I don't understand is why so many people here seem hell-bent on doing their part to make these distractions reality.

If you have legitimate reasons not to like Obama, fine.

But this continual focus on nonsense, the refusal to make a concerted effort to reject it, only hurts us all in the end.

It's up to us, each and every one of us, to break the cycle of bullshit.

Obama is doing a fair job of it. He's not spotless, by any means, but it's clear he's making an effort to avoid cheap shots whereas Clinton would be lost without them.

I just really don't get why Obama's call to reject the politics of the right is so consistently ignored.

If you step back from partisanship and consider the health of the republic, the need for a serious and engaged citizenry to make informed decisions, etc., can anyone actually argue that Obama's call is undesirable?

This is what infuriates me about Joan's pieces; their content is so defiantly status quo it almost seems spiteful, as if the more Obama calls on all of us to rise above, the more people want to stay in the mud by way of saying, "Yeah, fuck you, Obama!"

And this from liberals!

You nailed it. The remark was ugly.

As far as I'm concerned, whether it was sexist or not is really a second-level issue. The primary issue is that such ugly, incendiary and generally unprofessional speech is the norm in our public discourse.

This is the root problem, not sexism. If we grant the premise that the remark was sexist, the real issue is that, in the current atmosphere, there's so little effort to use measured rhetoric because incendiary rhetoric and empty blather is what sells.

If only the problem was just about sexism. Far, far worse, the problem is we have become a nation literally losing the capacity for reasoned discourse. Because we lose this capacity (and indeed, don't even expect it), such rhetoric is simply par for the course.

Of course sexism is a real problem, but in the case of Olberman, the problem is one of professional ethics, generally.

But it's not about Olberman, it's about the entire media culture, whether it's incendiary or just vacuous beyond endurance (e.g., Wolf Blitzer), the problem is what we broadly refer to as the dumbing down of America.

I appreciate what Joan is trying to do, but I think it's far more productive to go for root causes rather than incidental symptoms.

"I want to be one of the people who, at the end of this race, facilitates Democrats coming together."

I just wanted to say that I find this very admirable. I've been extremely critical about what's seemed to me to be a squandering of the incredible platform you have here, adding more heat than light and failing to strive towards, let alone achieve some standard of excellence that pushes your readers to new and unexplored places.

Because I've been so critical, I wanted to acknowledge that your goal of reconciliation is really an admirable one and I respect it. Whether you're going about it in the most effective way is another matter which perhaps should be the topic of one of your future essays.

Also, I really did think your previous essay was leaps and bounds beyond most of the stuff I've read, as far as intellectual honesty goes.

Thank you for that and please don't take my criticisms personally, I just believe fervently that you are in a position of public trust and as such your contributions should be held to the highest standards of excellence.