Mr. Blumenthal (and editor Walsh),

I really do appreciate your perspective on issues surrounding the presidency of George W. Bush and his minions, but I must ask: do you intentionally write your opinion pieces with intent to alienate the majority of readers?

To use the Italian term "omerta" in and of itself is pretentious (I'll ignore, for the sake of this post your gratuitous Latin reference), but when you know that the term means "conspiracy of silence" (according to Merriam-Webster--and I'm sure you do) and you're discussing the actions of one individual you open yourself not only to accusations of elitism, but also accusations of levelling ad hominem attacks. Accusations which I feel quite secure in saying are valid.

Your confidence and certitude are quite welcome coming from a Democrat who so recently served in the halls of power, but I fear your tendency to extrapolate out to the nth degree and call it a sure thing (you've been predicting the immanent fall of this adminstration for years now) coupled with your insistence on using obscure, uber-intellectual references makes your point, ultimately, moot.

That is truly a shame. Because, like I said before, you have a very compelling perspective. More people should have access to it.

Good luck with that.

Sincerely,

Election Day 2000: I vividly remember sitting on my couch at 2:30am PST, watching a terribly loopy Jim Lehrer and thinking, "well, at least this should be the farthest swing of the right-ward pedulum. Look out, Middle--here we come! That's good for the country, and--it's all I've got, so in that light, Godspeed George W. I mean, how bad could it be?" And, I went to bed disappointed, but heartened.

Cut to, Now: In my worst nightmares I couldn't have imagined the horror, the disgrace, the catastrophe that the Bush presidency has turned out to be.

While it's nice to see that my thoughts on the rightward turn were perhaps prescient, it will take--perhaps--decades to repair the damage these 'evil-doers' have done to our nation in Its name.

I read Ms. Dickerson's article with reluctance having found her previous column on Barack Obama petty and self-consciously racist. I was quite pleasantly surprised by the longing, the confusion and the open-heartedness expressed here.

Her musings regarding her own children seem to run head-on into, and right on over her musings of Obama's racial cred. If she can extrapolate out from her own family to the broader world I should think that a retraction of her comments on Sen. Obama should be forthcoming.

I look forward to that.

Birkenhead, via his logically ungrounded arguments, could serve as the poster-child under the heading "pearls before swine". Read some freakin' Wilber or Spiral Dynamics. Mr. Birkenhead is a flaming secular, orange/green flatlander. Thank you, but we've had about 75 years of your worldview screwing things up. Perhaps hope and intentional visioning aren't the embodiment of Satan that you seem to believe. All the better for those of us who've moved beyond it. With any luck, we'll constitute a majority before it's too late.

Because, again--seriously, your worldview has all the political and cultural cred as that of the Christian Right, only spewing from the Left. Sweet...how proud you must be (and how fucked the rest of us must be that the pendulum will likely swing back your way before a third-stream populism takes hold!!!).

You keep right on dismissing everyone who doesn't agree with your opinion and see how quickly the world comes to resemble something of YOUR choosing: shitty as it is to admit it, democracy still functions within the paramaters of the secret (it's called the collective conscious--and all you have to do is look around the ENTIRE U.S. to see that we got what we deserved in 2000).

Toodles...