Given Colin Powell’s politics, Democrats are clearly exaggerating the significance of Powell’s endorsement of Obama. After all, what’s so shocking about one black liberal endorsing another? Isn’t this the same man who, unlike most Republicans, supports gun bans? Isn’t this the same man who, unlike most Republicans, supports affirmative action as is? Isn’t this the same man who, unlike most Republicans, supports abortion rights? Isn’t this the same man who, unlike most Republicans, saw the situation in Iraq as a civil war and not the insurgency it in fact is? Who opposed the surge and thinks we should sit down with Iranian radicals that no serious leader anywhere in the West has been able to reason with in 30 years? I suspect that what motivated Powell’s endorsement was guilt he may feel having let his wife Alma emasculate him thoroughly, ordering him not to run for the presidency himself in fear of someone trying to shoot him, a threat that didn’t deter 200 years worth of white candidates who, unlike Powell, put their country ahead of their wives’ paranoid fears. Powell knows he blew it, he knows he should have been the nation’s first black president, his huge popularity situating him well in 2000 to have sprinted right past George W. Bush if he only had the guts to escape from Alma just long enough to grab a brass ring that all but had his initials on it once and for all. So no, I don’t fear Powell. For that matter, I don’t fear any hidden agenda to get even with Republicans whether it comes from the drive-by media, the bigmouthed airheads of the entertainment industry, or ex-generals who can’t face up to the fact they’re nowhere near as courageous off a battlefield than they are on one. Frankly, I’d have been more impressed with PowellâÄôs endorsements had he come out for a white liberal like Hillary Clinton instead. Mark D. Overholser reader