In the "Guess I Got Under Her Skin" category, a letter to the editor of Evening Sun in Hanover, PA:

Editor:

I am writing in response to your column in Sunday's Evening Sun [Nov. 2] in which you analyze the columnists in the past few weeks' issues. You determined that there were roughly seven pro-McCain and seven pro-Obama columns, and concluded that your paper is presenting a balanced view of the political climate in this country.

This is the Prelude to Not Good Enough.

Although I appreciate the fact that you wish to reflect in your paper the views of your constituency, I need to point out one element that I found missing in your analysis, and that is that several of the columnists who are said to represent the views of the "right" - Diana West, in particular - are actually so far off the mark as to be incendiary and inflammatory, and frankly, to offer outright lies.

For example....nothing. She doesn't point to a single inaccuracy on my part, just to some broad descriptions she rejects.

In her columns, Diana West has repeatedly tried to link Barack Obama to Muslim terrorists and to '60s radicals--

I don't have to try: Muslim terrorists and their supporters have endorsed Barak Obama, whether I bother to point it out or not. And we know that Obama has been supportive, once upon a time even financially, of PLO sympatherizers, if not mouthpieces. As for Ayers, Dohrn, ACORN, Klonsky, the socialist New Party--the whole radical grab-bag--the only effort involved here is that of the MSM's who didn't want to do their job of informing the public about it.

--and to offer falsehoods and distortions of his political philosophy.

That's a hot one, given BO's own statements about redistributive change and spreading the wealth around, etc.!

I have not seen similar ad hominem attacks from the "left" - against McCain in your paper, and indeed it would be hard to find columnists from the "left" who have stooped to such tactics in this election.

Maybe that's because McCain has nothing analagous in his career. But here's the point. It is time, dear reader writes, to shut me down.

There is plenty of room for legitimate, healthy, and energizing dialogue between and among people of different political persuasions in this country and in this county, and The Evening Sun should play a significant role in promoting such dialogue.

Mighty big of her.

But for your paper to offer up such columnists as Diana West and The Washington Times as legitimate,representative defenders of the "right" is, in my opinion, to obviate any legitimate conversation.

Who's she calling illegitimate?

I believe she is an embarrassing, even shameful, example of the excesses of factionalism, and should not be relied on to represent conservative thinking in your paper. Surely there must be alternative voices from the right whom you could choose to speak to the concerns of the day. Diana West is certainly entitled to her views--

just not in a newspaper--

but I for one am not doing so well on a steady diet of her distortions of reality.

Gee, that's too bad.