Fonzi picked the wrong legacy 

Al Fonzi, the Chairman of the SLO County Republican Party, presumes to lecture us on the “left’s” destruction of American civilization and lack of accountability over the last 60 years in the Oct. 27 Rhetoric and Reason column, “A legacy of destruction.” Perhaps a brief review of Republican malfeasance over this same time period would cause him to temper his remarks. 

Let’s start with Richard Nixon and his henchmen (including the attorney general) and the Watergate tragedy and his disingenuous continuation of the Vietnam war and its chaotic ending. We can then move to Ronald Reagan and the illegality of the Iran-Contra fiasco (selling arms to Iran despite our arms embargo), the huge budget deficits and exploding national debt, and his personal humanitarian callousness toward the AIDS crisis. We then graduate to the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld debacle that was the Iraq War, the lies told repeatedly, the monstrous civilian and military casualties and the crushing debt caused by their arrogance and stupidity.

We now come to the spineless/gutless, moral, and ethical gymnastics of the Republican leadership (Priebus, Christie, McConnell, Chaffetz, McCain, Cruz, Rubio, and Paul Ryan, etc.) to support the misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic, racist, and destructive candidacy of one Donald Trump.

Finally, we come to the Republicans’ decades-long obsession of attacking women’s rights, voting rights, and LGBT rights along with their denial of science, environmental disregard, and a relentless commitment to ensure that monetary and tax policy benefit almost exclusively the wealthiest in this country. It would appear that there is enough of a “legacy of destruction” here to spare us any further lectures from Mr. Fonzi.

-- Carla Villa - Los Osos