Hillary Clinton

Your Jan. 9 editorial, “The First Lady’s Credibility Gap,” which questioned Hillary Clinton’s reluctance to reveal the truth, employed bizarre circumlocutions to avoid the use of the conventional four-letter word for a disingenuous individual. “Veracity”? “Veiled”? “Prevarication”? Give me a break!

HARVEY PASKOWITZ

Northridge

* Come on, Times. On Jan. 8 (“First Lady’s Papers Fuel Talk of a Cover-Up”), you run a front-page story, a so-called “news analysis,” in which only one side of the story gets aired (24 column inches elevating political tactics to the status of facts versus three-fourths inch of rebuttal).

On Jan. 9, the Op-Ed page features Cal Thomas, one of the TV talk shows’ second-rung conservative mouthpieces, allowing him to take his best shot, which he does in part by quoting another well-known paragon of journalistic evenhandedness, William “Payback-Time” Safire. And how do you balance out this generous helping of blatant propaganda? Well, you take it upon yourself to give us all a little lecture on the evils of obfuscating truth (editorial).

F. R. CHORNEAU

Manhattan Beach

* So, Safire has decided that the first lady is a “congenital liar” (Jan. 10). I hardly think that a man who spent years advising and writing speeches for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew can seriously be considered a fair arbiter of what is and is not the truth!

RAY WEINSHENKER

Los Angeles

* Hillary Clinton is a congenital liar. Bill Clinton is a pathological liar. There, I said it. The president can punch me in the nose for telling the truth.

RON YORKE