GOP Candidates

* I am tired of the other Republican presidential candidates and their supporters bashing Steve Forbes, simply because he was born rich. I, for one, would like to hear them debate his ideas, such as the flat tax, the privatization of Social Security, medical savings accounts, an anti-missile defense system, term limits, etc.

It is not a sin to be born rich, or to be wealthy. So let’s start talking about issues, and not indulge in “class warfare.”

STANLEY CARSON

Huntington Beach

* As a lifelong Republican, whose father and grandfather were also lifelong Republicans--and whose great grandfather was a Whig--I cry for the present state of the Grand Old Party and the current so-called “selection” process.

If we believe in the survival of the fittest, all they seem to have proved to date is that none of them is really fit to win.

There is only one scenario that makes any sense to me. Let’s hope for a stalemate, and that the convention can get its act together and nominate Jack Kemp for president and Dick Cheney for vice president, and that they will accept. Yes, they have inside-the-Beltway experience. But they are honest, moral and smart. They are real can-do men with vision for the future.

JAMES H. BERKEY

Palm Desert

* Bruce Herschensohn once again misses the point with his commentary on Pat Buchanan, “The Man I Know Isn’t a Racist” (Feb. 28). The salient issue is not whether Buchanan can be proved anti-Semitic beyond a reasonable doubt. The point is that, more than for most people, politicians live by and must be held accountable to their rhetoric. This is why so many are so derisive and vitriolic concerning Buchanan.

You can’t oppose civil rights legislation and call Martin Luther King Jr. “immoral, evil and a demagogue”--both of which Buchanan has done--and not be considered a racist. You can’t blame gays for AIDS and call the disease nature’s “retribution” without being labeled a homophobe. You can’t say women “are simply not endowed with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to success [as are men]” without earning the title of a sexist. Buchanan either is all the things we label him as, or he is too stupid to be a politician and temper the howitzer his mouth has become.

TOM BRAUN

Littlerock