as mentioned before: all the best news and commentary these days is coming from the regular people in the letters to the editor section

Editor -- In Marc Sandalow's article, "The Bush legacy" (Insight section, July 17), I appreciate very much the writer's attempt to paint President Bush in a favorable light. He is largely successful in portraying Bush as a realist, maybe a bit too obsessed with winning.

If any of Sandalow's 10 suggestions for Bush to incorporate in his remaining 3 1/2 years in order to leave a positive legacy were adopted, it would be a welcome relief. What Sandalow misses in his generalizations of liberals and progressives as "Bush-haters" -- a term conservatives love to hear -- is not that we don't love Bush. It's that we are alarmed -- nay terrified -- of the policies coming out of his mouth.

Why focus so much on who the man is? It's like trying to figure out who Michael Jackson is, or who Katie Couric is. Why not focus on what this administration is doing?

Every day since November 2001, when the United States went after the Taliban, and then invaded Iraq, lives have been lost. Every day, someone dies because of what this administration is doing. Soldiers are dying. Children are dying. People are dying.

Framing the events in terms of what George W. Bush is really like or how he will be perceived plays into the campaign created by Republicans and Karl Rove. By focusing on celebrity and myth, we lose sight of the real issues of the day, not the least of which is that our war is responsible for much more of a travesty than a bad legacy spin.

CHAS NOL, San Francisco