I didn't see a debate, an opportunity to compare and contrast ideas and proposals between two candidates. It was an insult.

"Senator Obama, even though no measure of a candidate could be more worthless than a willingness to pin a ceramic flag pin, probably made in China, to your lapel, you won't do it. What's the deal with that, Dude?"

"Senator Clinton, same question: Why do YOU think Senator Obama refuses to wear a flag pin on his lapel?"

And so on, and so on, to the weary end of the world.

Joan, I am very disappointed with Salon's coverage of this election as you consistently beat the drum for Hillary's nomination no matter the cost. You support her. I get that. But I so rarely see any articles telling me why I should vote for her or what makes her the best candidate, or addressing the serious reservations I have about her; however, I do see many articles trying to scare me out of voting for Obama. Throughout several letter threads I've tried to politely engage several Hillary supporters, and generally elevate the discussion beyond the Obamatron/Hillarybot sniping. I've exchanged a few pleasant posts with Hillary supporters, but still don't have the answers I seek.

A website like Salon should be leading the charge in elevating this debate. Instead of talking about Obama's alleged stumbles, you should be joining your voice to those who are rightly voicing frustration at the insipid questions, the last chance we have as voters, to listen and cast informed votes for the candidate who seems to best represent our philosophy and outlook toward the problems facing us. If Hillary and McCain were debating, and the first hour was devoted to asking Hillary questions about "likability" and "Bosniagate" and "Why didn't you divorce Bill? Are you a doormat, or just a dumb sucker, or were you afraid of losing access to all that built-up political power?"-- if that was the case, Joan, I don't think you'd be writing a column about her "stumbles." You'd be livid at the pointlessness of the questions; you sure as hell wouldn't be running around the next day suggesting she should just get "out of the kitchen" if she didn't like the questions.

Bottom line: I recently renewed a subscription to Salon using money that I really can't afford. I've been holding off on canceling that subscription in the hopes of seeing Salon take its place at the forefront of leading a helpful discussion of the where we stand as progressive/liberals, but so far this has not happened; I still have hopes, however. Hillarybots/Obamatrons: We do have a common enemy, do we not? Remember McCain? He of the Shia/Sunni what's the dif? foreign policy? Who thinks the Surge was all about cutting senseless slaughter by 30 percent and everything is just great? The guy who is actually being painted by the media as a MODERATE alternative when in reality he is nowhere near being a moderate?

Time's running out, Joan. You are perfectly positioned to assume a true leadership role in the coming months, but you can't achieve this by endlessly trying to tear down someone who should be viewed as a valuable ally in the greater war.

When Katrina victims were still piled up in the Astrodome, and the total incompetence of the Bush administration couldn't be more obvious and that the depth of the mess revealed a ground-up rottenness in their approach to, basically, everything, the major response by the right wing sound machine was to sneeringly start talking about how everyone was more interested in playing the "Blame Game" than getting down to work to solve the problems facing us... just so long as those solutions didn't involve dealing with the underlying rot. The policies are correct, the fact that they keep resulting in total disaster can only be attributed to forces that are mysterious and almost unknowable to the minds of men.

So it is with McCain. His "academic argument" is just a variation of the "blame game." He claims he is just dealing with the problem as it is, but in his view, accepting the correctness of the original policy is sacred and untouchable; the blunder came in implementation, not in adopting a policy that was ALWAYS doomed to fail. This is why he will continue to blunder us in even deeper. He thinks it's all about the implementation.

In advancing this argument, he is attempting to sound pragmatic, but it is a phony pragmatism. At this point, any candidate elected will have no choice but to deal with the situation as it stands. But McCain's inability to find value in looking at how we got here, now, when the lessons are so fresh and easy to learn, is anything but pragmatic. It's just a guarantee for more blundering, blindly, always sure that the next military adventure will be the one that finally does the trick.