I might have expected an invocation of Almighty justice much sooner than at the tail-end of Mr. Winner's comment, which confuses a discussion of what to do about nuclear escalationism and Professor Byrd's fatuous claim that there is nothing to choose between our own government and the one in Tehran. Actually, re-reading Byrd's original letter, I now notice the allusion to an "Earthly paradise" having been forfeited by allocating resources instead to national defense. What, pray tell, would such an Eden look like? This debate seems more and more a pen-pal program between messianic crackpots.

Byrd plainly states that President Bush is more dangerous than President Ahmadinejad and that the former is "intent" on destroying the latter's part of the world. I'd very much like to know such an unacknowledged legislator arrived at this conclusion. And why he imputes apocalyptic motives to the man with "meager" rhetoric when the man who speaks openly and frequently of wiping whole nations off the map is addressed as more of a pigmified nuisance than a major threat to humanity?

Mr. Winner is entitled to his charming opinion that this anxious and desperate confession begs the question of whether we must destroy the world in order to come to our senses (good luck trying that even in the conceptual phase, by the way). But if Ahmadinejad's beliefs and his articulated plan for a Shia utopia are irrelevant to the central purpose of this correspondence, why both writing a letter back to him at all?

Lastly, I'm honored to know that even in being described as a "white American," I can still somehow count myself a "victim" in Winner's epistemology. Must be yet another magic trick of neoconservatives.