Sen. Barbara Boxer

Re “Loss on Ethics Amendment Is Still a Win for Boxer,” Aug. 3:

So, Sen. Boxer has proclaimed herself the leader of a movement to force public hearings on ethics violations! Isn’t this the same Barbara Boxer who fought to keep her own ethics violations in the House banking scandal a secret from the public?

She succeeded in keeping that investigation confined to the Ethics Committee, although we ultimately learned (over her objections) she had “kited” 143 checks.

Until Boxer comes clean about her own sleazy activities and goes after just one liberal Democrat (perhaps a long overdue public hearing into Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick or Bill Clinton and Paula Corbin Jones), she will remain merely a “leader” of partisan politics, not “women’s issues.”

JOHN F. TINTLE

Nipomo

*

* Let me be the first crotchety, male chauvinist to assure you that the Packwood situation is not a feminist issue. I, for one, am irate about Sen. Bob Packwood. To hell with any “Senate protocol” Boxer may have violated in her quest to get hearings open to the public. This is just what the public has been hollering about--government is too big, too bureaucratic, too sneaky.

Republican men are not altruists. They aren’t circling the wagons to protect Packwood. They are simply trying to save the last vestiges of their own dignity--at the nation’s expense. In trying to shut down the hearings to the public, Republicans have just opened the breach wider.

Open the hearings, air out the wounds and let them heal properly so children can see that justice is supposed to be equal for all.

BEN P. COLLIER

Glendale