There was so much fodder in Luanne Van Werven's Republican Party platform in The Bellingham Herald Feb. 11 that I don't know where to begin! How about the "re-education" of voters? A peculiar word choice, but her word. If that sounds familiar, it was the term used by the Vietnamese and Chinese communists, as in "re-education" when millions were tortured and died at the hands of a government trying to repress and indoctrinate anyone with ideas not approved by the party. I didn't know the GOP had adopted Mao. Before Ms. Van Werven suggests that (non-Republican) Americans be "re-educated" she explains the Republican challenge is to convince voters that they "actually do identify with our (GOP) values," values like obstructing the Violence Against Women Act and allowing the ban on semi-automatic firearms to lapse. She writes that "Republicans will remind Americans of lessons we have already learned." She doesn't mean the lesson that Republican-sponsored deregulation of financial markets led to the worst financial disaster since the Depression, or the lesson that trickle-down economics, also touted by her, has never benefitted the middle class. I don't know about you but I deserve more than a trickle. It's pretty hard to pay your mortgage with a trickle. I could go on and on. By the way, Wikipedia defines re-education as a euphemism for brainwashing. Yup, sounds about right to me.

Mira Kamada

Bellingham