Huffington on Hillary Clinton

Re “A Prophetess Preaching to an Empty Choir,” Column Right, Sept. 12:

Up until now my opinion of Arianna Huffington has been conflicted, because while I disagree with her politics I have respected her intellect. Today I am no longer conflicted. I still loathe her politics; and her broadside against Hillary Clinton reveals that she is only an average thinker, with a command of the English language that George Orwell would have recognized.

JOSEPH W. DOHERTY

Los Angeles

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* There Arianna Huffington goes again, parading the bogies of the French Revolution and Marxism while making the unremarkable point that Hillary Rodham Clinton believes that government policies should help people.

At least she should get her vocabulary straight. The “security” which the French National Assembly affirmed on Oct. 2, 1789, did not mean “social” security in the modern social-welfare sense but security of person and property against illegal official seizure. Is Mrs. Huffington against that “social” ideal?

PETER LARSEN

Lake View Terrace

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* I just read Arianna Huffington’s attack on Hillary Clinton. Toward the end of her argument she tries to smear the First Lady by linking her to ineffectual and socialist or Communist European parties. I can’t see the validity of this linkage. It seems to me that a more truthful identification would be that of the many center-right Christian Democratic parties that seem to have been mostly in charge of European countries in the postwar era.

All these countries adopted sweeping packages of social legislation that, to use a dreaded term, turned them into “welfare states.” I don’t think they did it for any base political reasons, but this did have the effect of defanging and co-opting the many (and unlike today) politically potent socialist and Communist parties.

I think that a much more truthful identification than the linking of the very moderate Clintons with socialism and communism would be to compare the current GOP with the right-wing European nationalist parties that have for so long been an impediment to progress and democracy in Europe.

DAVID G. BARRETT

Costa Mesa