Dear John,

"And before that were those baseless attacks by those 200-some veterans, paid off by Karl Rove in l970, on the chance that 34 years later he'd be running George W. Bush for president and needed to soften you up. Everyone knows they had no case whatsoever (beyond the fact you were calling them rapists and killers), just as everyone knows how tasteless it is to mock your lifestyle. Everyone knows how hard you work for your money, how much you deserve it, and how hard to must be to find not one, but two women with quite so much dough. (If you were only a woman, people would see your story as the fairy tale it is.)

Even worse, it is mean, false, and mendacious to say that you were trying to call our brave men in Iraq and in uniform mentally challenged, when it was clear as day that you meant this to apply to the president, who ran rings around you when you last met in electoral combat; and whose grades in college were higher than yours."