After all, how often do you get to see a world figure, a Nobel Peace Prize winner? I saw his holiness at the majestic Kimmel Center, the perfect setting for such a holy man.

He spoke to a full house, well full at first. The eager crowd was full of old hippies, young yuppies, progressive types, liberal thinkers.

But the height of the hypocrisy was equal only to the height of the Himalayas that surround Tibet. Children of yuppies crying and talking while His Holiness enlighted the crowd. Cell phones breaking the solitude only a liberal peace-lover could command.

The angry murmur that went through the crowd when His Holiness proclaimed his love for George Bush was the exact opposite reaction you think you'd get from a bunch of peace-loving folk.

And by the end of the speech, a speech about tolerance, love and patience, a third of the crowd was long gone. So much for patience.

Don Gallagher

Philadelphia

Spreading Obama falsehoods

The uncaptioned New Yorker cover was supposedly a cartoon parody of right-wing Obama swift-boat falsehoods. Because there was no caption, even if the intent of the cover was parody, its effect was to amplify the very right-wing falsehoods that the cartoon was meant to belittle.

Had Oliphant's penguin made a comment in the corner, or a comment bubble by the Obamas in the cartoon made fun of the picture ("Rush, are we done posing for your picture, now? Can we start the interview?"), there would not have been the room for right-wing political terrorists to alter its meaning.

Christine Flowers (op-ed, July 18) joins Fox News in giving a small-circulation elitist literary magazine cover an audience for which it was never intended.

While the accompanying illustration tries to equate a National Review cover (John McCain as a helpless invalid in a wheelchair) with the New Yorker cover, this ignores neglects the Page 1 treatment of the Obama cartoon - as opposed to the McCain parody, which reached only a conservative elite audience.

Ben Burrows, Elkins Park