Dear Mr. Blumenthal: Your otherwise brilliant and helpful analysis of the Bush deviousness and distortion around the latest NIE is grievously flawed in your effort to interpret Bush's reference to Iraq becoming a mere comma in history.

The quote from Gracie Allen, "Never place a period where God has placed a comma" is not "a common admonition among the faithful" as you refer to Bush's Christian right wing base. On the contrary, the Gracie Allen quote has been adopted as part of the denominational identity of the United Church of Christ, a mainstream peace and justice oriented demonination and not remotely part of George Bush's base. The "comma" quote is a kind of coda for our national identity campaign based on the mantra that "God is still speaking."

I am writing as a member of the UCC so I understand this clearly. The intent of our faith stance is directly opposite Mr. Bush's view that there is a "received truth" from his faith that always and forever means the same thing, whereas in our tradition, as John Winthrop, a Pilgrim father said, "There is yet more truth and light to break forth from holy scripture." Gracie Allen's witty and profound remark conveys this idea. Bush puts periods after his pronouncements, but God puts a comma - more light to follow.

Because you quoted Gracie Allen, I have to believe that in the fringes of your consciousness you ran across one of the UCC's TV advertisements or something in print where the UCC included that quote, associated it with a "christian group" and then assumed that the connection was to "the faithful" as in the "Christian right." I would venture to say that the vast majority of UCC church members believe that Mr. Bush's invasion of Iraq was not "God's will", because the God we know and worship from the scriptures is a God of love, compassion, and justice, not a God of war. On Iraq, God is definitly "still speaking."

I believe Mr. Bush was using the "comma" remark to suggest that all the alleged problems with his invasion of Iraq would be reduced in history to trivia, a kind of "blip on the screen" or a mere "comma", a pause, as it were until the received wisdom of history has made clear that God Himself was behind the invasion of Iraq and so the outcome could not be more certain. I doubt that Bush even knows the Gracie Allen quote, or if he does he certainly doesn't understand what it means.

But it grieves me a bit to find you confusing the UCC denomination's deeper understanding of Gracie Allen's wisdom with the close mindedness of Bush and his right wing base.

Sincerely, David Cook

A book by Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival, tells you about all you need to know about the difference between the Shia and Sunni. The fact that the two groups have deep differences is what makes the Muslim world so unstable at this time in history, along with our invasion of Iraq.

What is more intriguing is that Bush was reported to have invited the Shia intellectual Fouad Ajami, Johns Hopkins University, to discuss the Iraq problem. Ajami warned Bush that the Shia resurgence in Iran and now Iraq was a historical process and could not be stopped. In the same report by Martin Walker in the Wilson Quarterly for Autumn 2006, the Bush administration apparently also consults with Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations. The upshot of this is that Bush has to be well informed about the Shia/Sunni divide, how dangerous it is as well as how intractable a problem it is. But he doesn't seem able to talk about anything but "terrorists" which conflates the two, nor can he back away from the clear impossibility of achieving anything remotely resembling "victory" in Iraq.

Dear Joan: I'm an obsessive reader of Salon (and for the record an old retired professor). When that email comes every day with the newest stories I'm hooked for a couple of hours or more. I sometimes even obsess with myself over how much time I spend reading stuff on the internet, but Salon is my prime source. So first I write to thank you for your leadership in assembling such a superb staff of brilliant writers who do their homework, know what they are talking about, and how to capture it for the page. I love your movie and book reviewers, and on and on.

I don't tend to follow the comments on most articles I read so I'm seldom aware of the sort of thing that you writers must deal with every day after you have written a piece to which internetworld gets to respond. So I was intrigued and somewhat shocked to read this piece on misogynist commentators. I thank God for parents who raised me in a way that inoculated me against sexism and racism. I believe my children are cut from the same mold. What you report is both bad and sad.

It sounds like you are taking a reasonable approach, but I think a case could be made for simply deleting from the postings any of those personal attacks on a writer that cut into the core of their humanity. I think the freedom to write and respond on the internet is a great thing, especially the freeing up of language usage such that words we know and hear every day, however "naughty", can appear in print. But I think you can justify a very low level of tolerance for some of the misogynist filth and plain meanness such as you quoted in your article without having to worry about the bugaboo of "censorship".

Dave Cook