Having been in sales all my adult life and also having seen and talked with some of the greatest salesmen provides some insight into W.

Being persuasive and charming (which I believe Bush is in person) has no particular correlation to any other skills. I've seen great salesmen who make a 7 figure income who thought they knew everything but in reality didn't know shit. These greatly persuasive salespeople had a God-given gift of persuasion - and not much else.

Now if this reality can take place in sales, then it surely can take place in politics. Is this thought redundant?

Who truly knows just how bright or mature President Bush truly is? I say: it doesn't matter. What does matter is that he has made colossal errors in both judgment and execution of policy.

The law of averages should be on our side: we can't elect two back-to-back incredibly ignorant people to the presidency. Can we?

What a clever strip; I'm constantly amazed at the inventiveness of cartoonists and their ability to conceptualize and convert a complex idea into a colorful and visual analogy.

I think the central idea worth evaluating is: did Breathed capture the essence? Anything else is of secondary concern. Look at it this way. If you love apple pie or rare steaks or chocolate chip cookies the only test is does it taste good. It doesn't have to be the best steak ever eaten - it just has to please your palate.

That's the test most of us apply to things we like; originality and uniqueness are not usually the most relevant issues; execution is.

Breathed did not invent every aspect of his cartoon, but he gets an A+ in my book for one simple reason: he nailed the concept and he did it in a very clever fashion.

Pride and ignorance goeth before the fall. Having been in the financial services business for a very long time, I've seen this kind of debacle several times. Executive Life, junk bonds, the dot.com meltdown, Equity Funding (many years ago) come to mind, and the pattern always looked the same. Those in charge were always smarter than anyone else and had discovered some new path to endless growth. Skeptics were laughed off and told that they just didn't understand the new paradigm.

In the end, the skeptics were right; there was no new paradigm and the laws of gravity had not been repealed. In the long run the laws of sound business practices cannot be violated.

What can happen is that short term behavior can obscure long term consequences. Countrywide abandoned sound underwriting practices and is paying the ultimate price. What is surprising is that we are surprised. I know a few brokers providing subprime loans and it was clear they were engaged in unsustainable practices.

Here's one law you can always depend on: if it looks too good to be true, it is too good to be true. Be prepared to pay a very big price if you forget this law.

That sex and all its manifestations is complex is well demonstrated by the wide and interesting variety of letters posted.

While I don't believe we'll ever reach consensus as to the appropriateness of his behavior or the police response, I believe another aspect of this whole discussion is that I think Craig is a menace.

We (the voting public) have asked Senator Craig to exhibit good behavior and work to enact compassionate legislation. He has surely failed on both counts. While I don't care what he does with his private life, it seems obvious that nowhere in his public life has he demonstrated much of anything but mean spiritedness and lack of compassion.

To me that makes Larry Craig a menace; someone we can not trust to exhibit good judgment and understanding. This inability to deal with his own dark side makes him unfit to be a guardian of the well being of his constituents, and by extension, the American people.

Larry Craig exemplifies what is always the easy way out: demonize that which we don't like or think is wrong. It seems only fitting that he has truly been caught on the hoist of his own petard.That so many others have joined him only separates rather than unifies our country.