Dear Mrs. Edwards...

Dear Elizabeth Edwards,

We just adore you. We stood in the rain for over an hour a few years back to see you and your family. We have credentials when it comes to loving the Edwards family. Because we are so fond of you, we'd like to impose on our one-sided friendship to make a suggestion. Or two.

Before we suggest, we want you to know that we voted for John. Both times. And not just because he's good looking.

OK...mostly because he's good looking. But also because we got that Kennedy vibe. And "Two Americas" resonated with us. And also because as he was leaving the venue in Lawrence, KS, he reached past his phalanx of Chippendales/Secret Service Agents and touched our hand. Right after he had put the same hand to his sweaty brow. And put his sweat on our hand. We didn't speak right for a week after that. So we get John Love. We really do. We really, really do. And how. Nobody that good looking should get brains, too. It's practically unfair.

We read this morning that you picked up the phone to attempt a reasonable dialogue with a woman whose name we have vowed never to type again. Her initials, though, are Ann Coulter. You asked her to stop calling your husband a fag (a dream we gave up on years ago), to stop saying she wished your husband would die in a terrorist attack, and to generally use the brain God allegedly gave her to raise the political conversation in our country, not debase it. Honey... You simply can't talk to these people that way.

You can talk to Greenpeace or PETA or the ACLU like that. But you can't talk to those other people like you would normal human beings. You have to talk to them like you would a black bear ready to drag your kids off into the dark. You have to scream and curse and wave your arms. They won't understand you, but sometimes they do wander away. And that's the goal. Just make them go away. With bears, as a last resort, you should shoot them with some sort of legal firearm purchased only for the purpoes of hunting. We don't dispute that this method also works on the people in question. We don't condone it, mind you. We're just saying. Your understandable expectation that you could reason with this woman as a human being misfired on its premise: she's not a human being.

Given every opportunity to claim satire, "just kidding", "gotta make a buck, I'm not gonna marry well" or anything approaching rationality, she declined. They're all like that. They really are. I know it's hard for our kind to imagine that there are entire packs of people like that, but there are. This is why we have suburbs. It keeps them where we can find them. We put lots of Wal-Marts and Applebee's around them because they're easily distracted. It keeps them out of our own neighborhoods, largely.

They've never liked anybody who wasn't vile. They've never said anything helpful. They have no goals that would improve life for anyone but themselves. Go see "Evan Almighty". (God knows we can't and they have to make their money back somehow.) Imagine that this is the kind of person that prompted God to flood the joint in the first place. Now realize they're all over the place. Thirty percent of America thinks we're heading in the right direction - and they all listen to Ann Coulter. Can you imagine? I know. It fairly boggles the mind.

We sincerely hope your health is excellent and that John inspires us to greatness once again. Thank you for lending him to the process. But please, in the name of all that is holy, stop talking to Ann Coulter. Every time we give her a reason to keep speaking, the Talibanis points to the T.V. and say,

"And they wonder why we have Burqas."

Love,

The After Therapy Gang