STICKS AND STONES: I received a particularly vitriolic e-mail from a Camel reader (and old friend) over the weekend. Here's the meanest and, to my thinking, most wrong-headed part:

"It is clear you have become a business whore, and all your protestations about voting for Democrats and subscribing to salon.com ring utterly hollow."

There's more, but I suppose I should deal with the rest of it in private e-mail. But I did want to post the above snippet simply because it brings up something I think is important and merits further discussion.

Facts are, I have voted for Dems for entire adult life, and I do subscribe to salon.com and support other seemingly liberal causes and outlets. By all appearances, I should be a sympathetic audience for the current crop of Dems. That I feel bereft of any party at all -- because remember, I loathe Bush's spendthrift ways and his selective tax cuts -- is the issue here. That there are many people like me who no longer cotton to strict Right/Left lines, who can see the fundamental illogic of affirmative action while still choosing to live lives colored by diversity, that's the issue here. That you can love peace but reject pacifism as an untenable political philosophy, that's the issue. That you can be a free-market capitalist without being a whore, that you can stop eating factory-farmed animals without being a tree-hugging, Big L Liberal, that you can be engaged by the political process and the ideas contained therein without having to adhere to pre-ordained dichotomies of Dem and Republican, etc.