Dear Hillary

You’re brilliant and charismatic, but right now I hate you with the passion of a betrayed lover. You are becoming the most powerful person in the Democratic Party. Your stardom is occurring in the rarest of historic moments: an electorate rejecting a once-popular war in the face of militant patriotism. Yet, you’re blinded by the ancient man-crap about who gets to come out of a race on top.

Instead of relying on your feminine intelligence and forging magnificent peace and social justice principles, you’re playing macho-political football with the horrific and gratuitous massacre of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, and of thousands of trusting Americans. Not to mention the future of American relations with a billion Moslems and the rest of the world.

The Bush administration isn’t much worried about 2008 or history’s judgment. All they want is to permanently expand America’s brutal control of the oil fields of the Middle East. With Edwards, Dodd and Kucinich calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq, and Obama flirting with it, you, Hillary, could unify most Democrats against Bush’s policy. And you could not only lead the withdrawal from Iraq, but the withdrawal from the century-long American and Western policy of using massive violence in the Middle East to feed our oil addiction.

Alternatives to this route are mirages. The nonbinding opposition to the “surge” is ludicrous. Claiming you’ll withdraw if elected is a rerun of Nixon’s now-transparent prelude to expanded gore. You could lead Congress into cutting off the war money immediately. American troop blood will be mainly on Bush’s hands if your clearly stated goal is to bring the troops home now.

Hillary, you could go down in history as saving America from its imperialistic self and as starting the feminine, nurturing processes needed for world peace. Instead, you seem mesmerized by the mere statistical breakthrough of becoming the first female president, but one who still acts like a murderous, macho man.