Salman Rushdie = Saddam Hussein?

My neighbor Bill Quick seems to wake up and start his day earlier than I do, so he usually gets first crack at the Letters to the Chronicle. Still, there's enough skull-crushing ignorance in the Bay Area to provide plenty of stupid letters for all of us

AYATOLLAH BUSH
Editor -- Hmmm! President Bush's latest counterterror madness (kill Saddam Hussein) puts me in mind of Ayatollah Khomeini's putting the contract out on Salman Rushdie. Maybe somebody would explain the difference to me. And this time, even the Congress appears to have gone insane.

MADELINE SMITH MOORE
Oakland

Sure, Madeline, I'll help. The difference between Salman Rushdie and Saddam Hussein is that Rushdie never hurt anybody, he only wrote a satiric novel about some people who have been dead for several hundred years. Saddam is a novelist too, but apparently not a very good one. But that's not why he should be killed. He should be killed because he is already responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the enduring misery of millions of others. He also threatens other countries and is developing weapons of mass destruction.

But I'm not sure what you mean about Congress going insane, unless you're talking about Cynthia McKinney or James Traficant . You might also be thinking about Barbara Lee , but I think that she is not so much insane as she is clueless.

Thanks again for your letter, Madeline, and please write again soon.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at June 18, 2002 08:58 PM