Dear Ms. Walsh:

You did it again! A couple of posts ago it was about debates and MSNBC and Chris Matthews of the world. Now it is about preachers of the world and (of course Obama’s preacher in particular).

Ms. Walsh will you please write a substantive column about your candidates’ foreign policy? Will you please do the right thing and shed light on an important aspect of a candidate that you want to be our president?

You see Ms.Walsh, I think your candidate’s foreign policy can affect my children and yours and many others in a big way. So it is important that we be vigilant now. I believe your candidates vote on invading and occupying a major oil producer in the middle east or her vote for Liberman’s resolution to declare another country’s military a terrorist organization ( so we can attack them later) or her intent on using nuclear weapons on a non-nuclear country (albeit in a hypothetical QA) were no accidents. Unfortunately, ever-since 9/11, our country has been caught up in a mind-set where war is an instrument of policy. Anything goes. “All options are on the table”. Crazies are out of the box. This is dangerous for us as a nation and it is dangerous for the world. Look at the consequences: half a million Iraqis are dead, millions displaced, not to mention our own casualties: 4000 dead and tens of thousands injured and trillions of dollars wasted.

We need sane and responsible heads in the office. Is your candidate one of the sane and reasonable politicians?

Therefore, will you please be as a good journalist as you claim to be and write about Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy (or any of the other two candidates for that matter). Tell us why she is the correct one to be our president. Is she really the correct one to answer the 3:00 am phone call when she already has indicated her determination to destroy 70 million people?

Best Regards

Crazies are out of the box. This is dangerous for us as a nation and it is dangerous for the world. Look at the consequences: half a million Iraqis are dead, millions displaced, not to mention our own casualties: 4000 dead and tens of thousands injured and trillions of dollars wasted.

We need sane and responsible heads in the office. Is your candidate one of the sane and reasonable politicians?

Hear, hear.

I couldn't agree more with the thoughtful letter from thehappychickenwillsmile. It's as if I had written it.

Joan, because of your post on the Moyers-Wright interview I just zipped over to PBS and watched the whole thing. And then I reread your piece. I don't often take the time to do something like that but I really felt as if I needed to see what you'd written about.

I'm amazed that you ignored the fact that in Wright's sermon (not "speech") on Sept. 16, 2001, he said he was quoting an American ambassador, Peck, who told Fox News that Malcolm X was right; America's chickens were coming home to roost. He even commented about how Ambassador Peck, by putting Malcolm X in the context of current events, was making the Fox News people very uncomfortable.

While I admit that I haven't exactly raced over to Fox's archives to see if Peck actually said the things that Wright cited, I'm left wondering why no one in our sorry-ass news media has managed to step up to the plate and point this detail out. I can only come up with two possibilities, neither of them very attractive: That a white man but not a black man can call on that particular Malcolm X quote in the wake of Sept. 11 and not be publicly vilified, or that our press is lazy and/or disinclined to tell the whole story. Or both.

I also think that you should have noted Wright's explanation that he was warning against conflating one's country with one's faith. Watching the sermon, it became clear to me that since a nation that is capable of creating the Declaration and the Constitution is also capable of wiping out Native Americans and imprisoning innocent Japanese-Americans, one should be very careful before indulging in that (Irving Berlin, are you listening?). Life — and our history — is just too complicated.

And alas, so is the "issue" of Jeremiah Wright. You are correct that the conversation we all deserve to have about him will never happen before November — there's not enough time. But meanwhile, I'd have to say that the Jeremiah Wright you saw on PBS and the Jeremiah Wright I saw were not the same man. The Jeremiah Wright I saw has driven me back to the Bible to look stuff up and to think. Let me tell you, that's saying something.

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4720370

You wrote:

"I can't help but wonder: Maybe Wright needs Obama to fail to justify his pessimistic view of American promise."

This is true ONLY if Wright's in a hurry, because win or lose, Wright's allegedly 'pessimistic' view is accurate, to a 'T.' (Although woefully incomplete, no doubt due to the limitations of airtime)

If Obama wins, it will be a disaster for the left, for women, for working classs Americans, for the concept of Universal Health Care, and, yes, for all Americans of color. And this view, of course, ignores the legitimate hopes, dreams, and universal rights of people the World over, who will suffer a continuation of the same imperialist, racist, inhumane torture, displacements and mass murders (terrorism,in other words) that America has perpetrated upon the peoples and sovereign countries of the World, relentlessly, since World War II. (With a bit of warm-up in the Robber Baron days, and a nice job murdering 18+ million Indians, of course).

If Obama loses, McCain brings America to Armageddon that much faster.

Those two are flip sides of the same coin, plain and simple. As a lifelong Leftist, I realized Mr. Obama was absolutely anything but a progressive when he started talking about bringing Republicans into the room to 'work out' American issues that were supposedly dividing the country.And his ridiculous notion that the very men who have a stranglehold on health care in this country (which is pathetic) would have any reason whatsoever to just, alll of a sudden sit down with this lightweight and proceed to 'negotiate' away their status quo. (The "I'll invite them to sit down and negotiate' bit is equal evidence of the most dangerous naivete, in addition to being a horrifying example of his typical 'hope' vs. action/results appeal)

I have news for you Mr Obama, we don't need their input. Period. A lot of their leaders, all of their theorists and Think Tank members, as well as a good chunk of the ownership of Big Media, in this country would NOT be negotiating anything, except, perhaps, burial arrangements, after judgment at Nuremberg, if there was even a shred of Justice left in this land.

Ms. Walsh, with all due respect, wake up. The people in power are not sitting on your TV set or occupying specific offices in the White House. And the Howdy Doody, black 'Ross Perot' vs. the 'white' Ross Perot 'choice' in the next election is not going to change anything. These war criminals have been running the Show for decades.

A look at history shows that the outcomes are pretty well limited to a horrifying self destruction, or an armed insurrection. A 'revolution', in other words, to balance the coup d'etat that happened in late 1963, with serious 'mop up' later in the Sixties (Hi Martin, Hi Bobby), and continuing aggrandizement, as we speak (Hi Mr Cheney, Hi Wolfie!). The outcome of the next election, politically speaking, in terms of change, will be the equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig.