The neocons have little left to say

Re “Barack Obama, the yuppie candidate,” Opinion, April 15

A young man is raised by a single mother in a low-income environment; he goes on to attend Harvard Law School and become a U.S. senator. His wife is raised on the Southside of Chicago in a low-income neighborhood. She goes on to attend Princeton. These two success stories are what Republicans say we should all aspire to -- hardworking, strong convictions, high moral values. But if these two people are Barack and Michelle Obama, then the Jonah Goldbergs of the GOP disdain them just because they don’t follow the right-wing conservative dogma.

The hypocrisy of the neocons is what has brought their movement to what it is today -- irrelevant, archaic and dead on arrival.

Mike Lockridge

Mission Viejo

I have to laugh when Goldberg lectures us about understanding “the lessons of Reagansim.” With regard to the current recession, I think we’re all learning the lessons of Reaganism now. Such lessons as the fallacy of supply-side “voodoo” economics and tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy while our jobs are outsourced overseas. Lessons such as socialism in the form of subsidies and monopolies for corporations while the people are strictly at the mercy of free-market capitalism and massive deficit spending by “fiscally responsible” conservatives. Lessons that have shown that deregulation and privatization are in reality merely Trojan horses for corporate corruption.

Yes, Mr. Goldberg, we’re painfully beginning to understand the true lessons of Reaganism.

Apparently you don’t. Or worse, you do.

Scott Trimingham

Torrance

As one who came from one of those small towns in rural Pennsylvania, and who keeps in touch with folks back there after all these years in California, I would say that Obama’s statement about the attitude of those Pennsylvanians was right on target. Iraq, Katrina, $4 gas -- yeah, I’m bitter. And Goldberg’s psychologizing is just so much claptrap.

Leroy Miller

West Hills