To Joe Conason and all the rest -- liberals and conservatives -- who are advocating anything other than the fastest possible withdrawal, just call your strategy what it is: Peace with honor. Remember that? A fig leaf to cover our retreat from Vietnam. A fig leaf that cost another 22,000 American lives and God only knows how many hundreds of thousand of Vietnamese lives.

Every day I watch my wife and her son, my stepson, and I see the care and the love she has put into every day of raising him. Every single day for fifteen years. Every day, I look into the eyes of my eight-month-old daughter and am inspired to do everything I can for her. Every day for the rest of my life.

Every soldier killed or maimed, every civilan killed, maimed or left homeless is someone's little boy or girl. A person into whom someone poured all of their love and all of their hopes. Many of them are also some little boy or girl's father or mother. When Joe Conason advocates some sort of delayed withdrawal, he is saying that it's OK to take that child away from his or her parents forever. Or to take those fathers and mothers away from their children. That what will be achieved is worth the sacrifices of lives and the pain and the loss that others will carry with them for the rest of their lives.

Stalin once said that a single death is a tragedy, a thousand deaths is a statistic. I say a thousand deaths is a thousand tragedies. People who advocate anything other than immediate withdrawal from Iraq are with Stalin, playing with lives on some sort of Middle Eastern chessboard. They are looking at the lives lost in some sort of abstract way. It is impossible to be in favor of continuing this war unless one is turning the lives lost and ruined into an abstraction.

This is not a time for politics. This is not a time to debate whether Howard Dean's choice of words is or is not good politics. Debating the framing is what gives aid and comfort to the war's supporters because it makes it look like it's all about politics. The force of the argument against the war is not political. It is moral.

Joe Conason needs to meditate on how it would feel to have his wife one of his parents or one of his children blown to bits for iraqi stability.

It was his quote about deaths and statistics, and the comparison to others who are willing to spend other people's lives to play global power games. People who look on other people's lives as abstractions.

I don't think Conason and other supporters of the war or of a more gradual pullout from Iraq are a mass murderers, paranoid lunatics who have their political enemies killed, the architects of a police state, isolationists or Communists, either.

As for comparing me to Stalin because we are both allegedly isolationists, something tells me that Stalin didn't shed a lot of tears of the deaths of other people's children or for those of the parents he sent to the Gulag.

I'm all for free speech for these protesters under the same terms that protesters agains George Bush get when he blows into town for a visit: put them behind a chain-link fence far enough away that people going to the clinics don't even have to see them.

Harm? I'll tell you about harm. How about five years of longing, crushes, frustration, excruciating shyness and being generally lovelorn between the first sexual stirrings and the day I finally got some? The junior high and high school years were one long nightmare. Emotional carnage. I shudder to think. Being seduced by a hot teacher would have made not only my day but my whole school year.

So Michael Scherer wants to shill for the man who physically and politically embraced George Bush in a campaign that saw the draft-dodging cokehead from Texas use surrogates to slander a Vietnam vet? He wants to promote the independent maverick with integrity myth about John McCain? What contemptible tripe. What absolute crap. Maybe Scherer should just quit Salon now and get a job with the McCain 2008 committee. This article is just loathsome.

McCain is a rightwing Republican whose loyalty this destructive, incompetent administration trumps all. Disagreeing with Bush on one issue or two issues does not make him Bush's nemesis. And this poor excuse for a reporter is Salon's Washington correspondent? What great political insight does it take to swallow McCain's PR hook, line and sinker? Look no further for an explanation for why, after six or seven years, my subscription is no longer on automatic renewal.

Or interpretations of Austen's book. Sure, as Anthony Lane said, the movie Brontefied Austen. But so what? Look at all the different versions of Romeo and Juliet out there. Everything from the Zefirelli movie to West Side Story.

It's a real tribute to the genius of Jane Austen that three version of her story (The BBC miniseries and Bridget Jones's Diary are the other two)can be created within a few years and all be wonderful in their own ways and highly successful.

As for rolling in her grave, are you kidding? Austen would most certainly be highly amused.