Letters: Paul Ryan on Obama

Re “Ryan leads GOP assault,” Aug. 30

After four years, Paul Ryan asks, isn’t it about time that President Obama assume responsibility for the economy?

Ryan and his party conveniently ignore the fact that eight years of Republican economics produced a stock market crash and left the economy hemorrhaging millions of jobs. Now they want us to return to the same trickle-down policies that caused the problem in the first place.

Where’s the responsibility in that?

Daniel J. Stone

Los Angeles

If schadenfreude were an Olympic event, I would feel like a gold medal winner after watching Ryan eviscerate Obama’s dreamy utopianism.

No one knows who will prevail Nov. 6. However, the moral clarity derived from Ryan’s principled, persuasive account of the administration’s fecklessness — and what is possible with earned success — offers a measure of satisfaction and, dare I say, hope.

Gary Harrington

St. Petersburg, Fla.

Puffery, spin and hyperbole are all fair game in a political speech. Still, I was saddened to see Ryan, who seems a decent man, resort to complete inaccuracies, such as the claim about Obama gutting Medicare and blaming the president for a factory closure that started when George W. Bush was in the White House.

To depend on either the blind partisanship or plain ignorance of facts in your listeners is deeply cynical. If you are serious in your proposals, present them honestly and let’s debate them. But trying to dupe voters by asserting blatant falsehoods does violence to our political process.

Michael Olson

Pasadena

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