Editor:

CRUD members (the Committee to Really Unelect Dick), who temporarily reformed as CRAS (the Committee to Really Abolish Sarah) have achieved victory in that family's character assassination and are back on Dick's case. He, you may recall, was the American vice president for eight years, not Alaska governor for two, so he's a loftier target.

Five years ago a small Democratic cabal got a speaker who wowed their national convention; up to that point he�d been a community organizer and had a book ghost-written and subsidy-published in his name. He was running for senator in Illinois in which the leading Democratic candidate was ditched by the Dailey machine. This was a complicated deal involving a congressman who had to give up his Chicago congressional seat to become governor. The replacement congressman, Rahm Emanuel, son of an Israeli terrorist, is now Obama's chief of staff. Let's not talk about what happened to the governor; a lot of what was going on was being taped by the feds.

The U.S. attorney for Illinois, Patrick Fitzgerald, had been transferred to Washington in 2004 to investigate a 2003 CIA complaint to the Justice Department that one of their undercover agents had been surfaced to newsmen. The law governing this offense was highly specific, and the "agent" didn't match the specs. But the Justice Department went ahead anyway, to torment the agency. Fitzgerald declined to investigate the State Department official who did the original outing in early 2003, preferring as his target Dick Cheney's aide, "Scooter" Libby, who uttered in mid-year. From this tangle, Libby was convicted of perjury and fined. President George W. Bush at the end of his term pardoned the conviction, though not the fine.

With no one minding the store in Illinois the strange emergence of our current president remains unexplained - unless Dick will give it a chapter in his new book.

DAVE RAYNOLDS, Lander