Web Letters: The Weepy Witch & the Secret Muslim

Thanks and kudos to Katha Pollitt for this column. There is indeed a risk that revving up the opression sweepstakes, which have for some time been the bathroom cock-size comparisons of mainstream liberalism, will result in John McCain giving the inaugural address in a little under a year. It kind of makes me yearn for that white-male-inspired class politics Pollitt has incrementally pooh-poohed over the last few years. Not that I'm going to vote for John Edwards on that basis.

Douglas Presler

Minneapolis, MN

I'm in complete agreement with this column. Since the news has become "infotainment," a new word needs to be coined for the people--Chris Matthews, Tim Russert etc.--who deliver this stuff. Infotainers, I guess.

If only serious journalists would take on another possible subject, such as Mike Huckabee's disturbing ignorance of everything except the Bible--the result, no doubt, of an inadequate "education" at an obscure Baptist college where, to limit his knowledge as much as possible, he majored in religion.

When Andrew Jackson was elected, John Quincy Adams bemoaned the fact that the US now had a President who knew neither Latin nor Greek. Admittedly, this was in part a snobbish New England reaction to a frontiersman who had worse attributes--slave-owning, genocide of American Indians, and killing a man in a duel. But if you read the letters of Thomas Jefferson, you'll note that a knowledge of classical literature served him well in his progressive attitudes toward religion and science.

How horrified Jefferson would be at Huckabee, who seems to have the worldview of a tenth-century European peasant, a worldview that he would like to transform into agenda and policy. Yet rather than question his credentials or investigate his background, the pundits are taking as their target the biracial candidate and the female candidate for President.

Carol V. Hamilton

Pittsburgh, PA