Hillary Clinton

* Re “Hillary Clinton-Style Social-Worker Liberalism Has Some Dark Areas,” Commentary, Aug. 19:

Alexander Cockburn misses the point when he asks how Hillary Clinton reacts to the study that correlates increases in abortion rates with reduced crime rates and concludes that how she would respond to that question is important.

Socially engineered “beneficial social cleansing” may or may not result from abortion; Roe vs. Wade was and is about a woman’s right to choose, whatever her motivation. Any reduction in crime resulting from aborting the largely unwanted children that would otherwise have been born should logically be viewed as a beneficial side effect and not as the motivation.

Cockburn often begins with an inflammatory, often infuriating statement, such as the one in this article which states that Mrs. Clinton “was an enthusiastic advocate for the cluster bombs that now litter the Serbia and Kosovo landscapes.” I usually find that the lead sentence was in fact only an attention-grabber, only loosely related to article.

LARRY KIRCHOFF

Nipomo

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Cockburn’s piece on “social engineering” was accurate in its description of Hillary Clinton. Cockburn dishonestly fails to point out that he is firmly entrenched in the same camp. The greatest social engineer of modern times was Cockburn’s hero, Karl Marx. The most horrific engineering experiment was Cockburn’s paradise, the former Soviet Union. What does Cockburn think the attempt to create a new “Soviet man,” who would be both socially and genetically (Lysenko) collectivist, was but a great attempt at social engineering?

SAMUEL F. RINDGE

South Pasadena