To the editor:

Judging by the article in Wednesday’s Journal-World, Congressman Jim Ryun is either seriously out of touch with reality or attempting to mislead us for partisan political purposes. He demonstrates this by parroting the Bush administration line on Iraq that ignores the facts visible to us all. As columnist Jim Hoagland (a supporter of regime change in Iraq) writes in Thursday’s Journal-World, recent pronouncements by the Bush Administration “betray a willingness to see the world as you would like it to be rather than as it is, and a readiness to hope that gap goes unnoticed or unexamined.”

Mr. Ryun delves further into the world of doublespeak when he dismisses comparisons of the Iraqi conflict with what happened in Vietnam because “We won the war in Iraq” and what’s happening now is something totally separate and different than what took place last spring. With some 800 U.S. troops killed and many thousands more wounded (most since President Bush told us the mission was accomplished), it’s apparent that Mr. Ryun wasn’t paying close attention to what took place in southeast Asia 35 years ago.

Gil Zemansky,

Lawrence