Dear President Ahmadinejad, on your visit to America,

Welcome.

You’re awfully coy, aren’t you Mr. President? Asked about President Bush's religiosity, you took the easy way out -- calling him a hypocrite for simultaneously being a Christian and waging a war. Point taken, but you're not the Dalai Llama. Confronted with your Holocaust denial, you hide your anti-Semitism behind a phony high-minded defense of science and call for free inquiry and ongoing research. Later, pressed about executions of homosexuals, you said you didn’t have any. Not like we do here, anyway. Is it because you’ve killed them all already? As disgusted as I am by your general existence, even you, I believe, could not be so cruelly efficient. You couldn’t be that callous, and you couldn’t be that good at it.

What caught my eye was that you trapped yourself, a surprise for someone as gifted at playing word games as yourself. It’s a skill, I grant you that; President Clinton appeared on The Daily Show a few days ago and the mere sight of his faced stirred up longing in me for a rhetorically gifted leader. Or at least a spoonful of genuine charisma. Still, you erred: after your appeal to modern reason to defend your desire to destroy Israel, you denied the existence of gay Iranians. It’s just not true, Sir. Any decent scientist, who you claim to respect so much, would tell you that a certain percentage of the population everywhere on the planet is born with a natural disposition to homosexuality. Of course, I assume that like our leader you believe it’s a choice, and one that dooms its choosers to the fires of hell. Like him, you appeal to cold reason when it suits you, and ancient mysticism when it does not.

Given our society’s bent toward hyperbole when it comes to comparison, let’s make it clear – I’m not saying that our leader is as bad of a person as you are. He is cruelly misguided by advisers in some fashions, and in others believes the almighty shows him the one true path, rendering all fact or constructive criticism obsolete. But George does is less apt, for instance, minimize an atrocity against a people so he doesn’t have to feel guilty or look bad for wanting to wipe them off the earth this time around.

It pains me to defend Bush, so let me just come around to the point: I hate both of you. I hate that those of us who would write and work and play catch with our kids and have a big brunch on the weekend not only have to share the world with hatefully limited thinkers like the two of you, we also surrender the sovereignty of our very lives to you two. If you go to war, all of our lives get worse.

Now go home and leave us alone.