Right on. Some people you don't even want on your side. Think of it as affirmative action. They needed a male inarticulate ignoramus to balance Palin.

Yes, this is not a baseball game. Shall we call it civil pollution, or does someone have a better word? Unfounded hatred doesn't always spontaneously decompose and vanish.

I'll also tell them about singing "We shall overcome" at a memorial service for Martin Luther King forty years ago. I remember Medgar Evers and James Meredith and my bewilderment as I watched on television the screams of outrage that greeted a black man who dared, of all things, to enroll in a state university. We've got a ways to go, but we've come a long way, and by "we" I mean we Euro-Americans. God bless you.

Bigotry and name-calling from the left is as destructive as bigotry and name-calling from the right. Stop calling people like Pipes "hatemonger"or worse, and I'll refrain from calling you an "enemy of Israel" or "self-hating Jew" or whatever is current on the other side.

One thing that has greatly impressed me about Obama is his avoidance of the polarizing rhetoric that has greatly depressed me about McCain/Palin. When you begin by calling Pipes a "hatemonger" I assume I am reading liberal drivel. It's the equivalent of a right-winger referring to "Arab terrorist Rashid Khalidi." If I see that, I, like you, know he doesn't know what he's talking about, but merely hates Obama and is throwing mud.

Stop playing to the crowd that already agrees with you, show that you've opened your mind to something coming from the right of the New York Times, and people like me might actually listen to you. Shalom.

Sorry if I'm missing the sarcasm. A person who shows occasional twinges of conscience while others under his authority do his dirty work for him is not a nice guy. In my book, he's lost more than the election. Nasty sellouts finish last, too.

Had anyone noticed before now that Cheney had not endorsed McCain?

Is this damning by faint praise, or shall we say a knife in the back? Cheney is many things, but he is not stupid, and surely knows that his endorsement will not bring McCain a single vote he doesn't have already.

As McCain's ship sinks, Cheney throws him an anchor.

You left out a third major influence on Lincoln's prose: the King James Bible. Lincoln was a religious man, even though not a conventional Christian believer, and knew the Bible well. Its plain, unhewn phrases became the cornerstone of his rhetoric, democratic in its simplicity, urgent for righteousness.

I second the Old Grouch's "near-despair at the poverty of expression we endure, from both our leaders and our fellows." What is even worse is that behind the poverty of expression lies the pride of ignorance.

That was before I learned more about McCain and saw his recklessness in choosing Sarah Palin. McCain's choosing someone that ignorant and inexperienced, with only minimal research into her record and character, proved he is unfit to be President. Palin, who would have something like a one in six chance of succeeding to the office, would be a disaster. Since then, McCain has not let his ignorance of economics interfere with his grandstanding intervention in Congressional bailout deliberations, nor has he let his once-respected decency interfere with sleazy campaigning.

Anyone this bad for America can't be good for Israel, and Palin would be worse. If it comes to war in the Mideast, the last thing Israel needs is an American President who thinks God put her in the White House to fight Armageddon. I thought Krauthammer got that. Now I don't get Krauthammer.

Obama may be hiding some things. He probably went through a leftist period he doesn't want to have to explain. But he's not, God forbid, a jihad sympathizer or an antisemite. He's a thinker, not a fanatic, and we can talk with him. How Obama became and remains a veritable bogeyman to some people, with so much unconfirmed suspicion outweighing so much demonstrated fact on the other side, I don't know, and I don't think I want to.

According to the article, McCain defended the Confederate battle flag as a symbol of Southern "heritage." I too have white Southern ancestors, but it is way too late in the game to deny that what made the South "the South" was slavery, the war to keep slavery, the serfdom and segregation that followed, and the persistent struggle to repress and deny the shame of it all.

The reunions of the black and white McCains give hope that America can straighten out the warps that slavery has left in its soul. Barack Obama carries the symbolism of that hope, and that symbolism gives him an powerful advantage. But this story comes to tell us it is not an unfair advantage. A candidate who refuses to repudiate the symbols of racism cannot complain if people symbolically repudiate racism by voting for his opponent. He who lives by the Confederate battle flag shall die by the Confederate battle flag.

The tactic will backfire among one demographic they are trying to scare, older Florida Jewish voters. Knowing "Barrys" who were "really" named Baruch, they will assume the truth, that in his youth he went by "Barry" to fit in, and identify with him.

The wonderful thing about an African-American candidate is that he doesn't have to show deference to, or pay off, professional African-Americans (as distinct from African-American professionals) like Jackson and Sharpton. Jackson is no doubt miffed that Obama doesn't want and won't pay for his help, so he's trying to hurt Obama to see if Obama will pay him to stop.

The Jewish and Israeli right-wing media has been pushing the "Obama has Muslim/terrorist connections" line. (The liberal Jewish media, of course, is pro-Obama.) I am a committed Zionist and Obama supporter, and I've found myself in an unpleasant fight with a Zionist friend who has swallowed that line.

I have been doing my best to reassure her that (a) the suspicion is based mostly on innuendo; (b) that Obama is willing to talk and listen to someone doesn't necessarily mean he agrees; (c) plenty of Jews have endorsed and advise Obama, and they aren't all anti-Israel left-wingers (I live in Obama's neighborhood and know some of them); and most importantly, (d) neither America nor Israel needs an American president who has a dubious political history, is reckless, unstable and 72 years old, and whose vice-president is an ignorant, inexperienced, Christian fundamentalist twit.

Jesse Jackson knows perfectly well that a statement like that is unlikely to gain Obama votes from anti-Zionists, but will go straight to the gut of my friend and Jews like her. We have to point out what should be obvious, that people like Jackson and Farrakhan, different though they may be, have an obvious interest in seeing Obama lose. If Obama wins, it won't mean racism is dead, but it will show that America can deal with it without their "help."

Jackson is a man whose time has gone. His endorsment of Obama as an "African-American leader" is next to worthless, but his supporting Obama as a known antisemite has substantial negative value among Jewish voters, and he knows it. Politicians in their decline get ugly, don't they?