What is most disturbing about this report is not the fact of abuse, nor the utter failure of Guiliani to empathize with the victims of abuse, but the total failure on his part and on his friend's part to recognize the importance of a distance between the Church and society. This priest is not apart from society, a shepard of souls, but a player in the civil society he is supposed to be providing some judgment and perspective upon. he isn't an activist, protesting the immrialities of power, but a corrupt power player. The Catholic Church is authoritarian in character, which is simply its history. Modernity meant, as Max Weber discussed at length in his major work Economy and Society, that theocratic authority was to be divorced from political authority. In the US, that difference was well in the minds of the enlightened founders, many of whom were merely deist, and almost all of whom were suspicious of the Catholic Church. This article isn't so much about loyalty as it is about faith and its viscissitudes, the terrible blindness of blind faith, and the corruption of the souls of those who seek to judge all of us. It frightens me that this man is a serious candidate for president.

For those who condemn Mailer for being an ass: Yes, he could be an ass, and yet he was as honest as he could be about his own asinine side. His outrageous argument about feminism, people often forget, was born of his explicitly announced fear of the irrelevance of men, which of course doesn't excuse his rage and hate, but was, whatever else, a stand that he knew wouldn't stand in the long run. And he put himself on the line his entire life, which few of our current writers do. I don't think anyone else could have produced a work like The Executioner's Song, and that was precisely because Mailer had gone to the excessive before, and was wise enough by then to rein it in. If that alone was all he had done, his place in American letters would be secure. But he also captured the lost soul of this country in Armies of the Night, and -- barely mentioned by most obits -- Miami and the Siege of Chicago. What more do the small people want of him?

Thomas L. Dumm

Just a note of thanks. You've made warroom mandaotry reading for me. Tom Dumm, Chair, Political Science Dept., Amherst College

I'm a bit surprised that Walter Shapiro didn't include Missouri among the bellweathers. Missouri has turned into an up-for-grabs state, and since 1900, in the general election, anyway, as goes Missouri, so goes the nation. (At least that is what was being claimed on NPR yesterday afternoon.)

Tom Dumm

In 1980 I was young and foolish, and I said young and foolish things. Among the things I said was "If Reagan is elected, it will be such a disaster that the Democrats will return to power in 1984." This was the sort of ideological stupidity -- in grad school, informed by Marxist dialectics -- that drives true believers to claim that things have to get worse to get better. I am just tickled that the ideologues of the Far Right are now seizing upon that historically fallacious idea. Sometimes, when things get "worse," they continue to get "worse." I'm glad that the Republicans are about to learn that lesson -- I hope it takes them as long to learn it as it did the Democrats.

As a writer, my dream is a death like that of William F. Buckley -- at my desk, pen (figuratively or literally) in my hand. And surely his family deserves condolences at this time. But as a public intellectual, over a span of some 50 plus years, I don't know that he ever retracted or apologized for two positions that NR notoriously held during the 1950s -- the support of racial segregation and of McCarthy. It seems that the reactionaries that compose the intellectual cohort of the GOP have only ever been able to praise the civil rights movement long after it was safe to do so. And as for McCarthyism, it is no accident that Anne Coulter was able to write a book in praise of Gunner Joe -- the model was provided by Buckley himself. Yes, his vocabulary was extensive, and he had wit and deep intelleigence, but they were put in the service of some pretty odious causes.

I wept as I read about this documentary. My late wife went to UT, Austin, and she never convinced me to go to Austin with her to spend time at Barton Springs, even though she waxed poetic about how it defined Austin as a wonderful community. And now it has been ruined.

Obama's speech did what it had to do -- speak the truth, but speak in such a way so that all of could recognize it as true. Whether he gets the Democratic nomination for the Presidency this time or no -- and he certainly should -- he has given us a teaching moment.

I supported John Edwards until he dropped out of the race, and came within a hair of voting for Clinton in the Massachusetts primary (in the end, it was less Obama, and more fear of Clintonism that kept me from voting for her). It is time, now, for John Edwards to get off the fence, endorse Obama, and instruct his 26 delegates that he wants them to cast their convention vote for Obama. In this speech, Obama reached out to exactly the Edwards core. What are you waiting for, John?