President Clinton

* You dismiss the opposition party’s clamor for public disclosure of Clinton’s Whitewater episode as “politics” as if it were a pejorative (editorial, Jan. 13). Politics has become a dirty word because of the abysmally low level of the people who practice them. Politics aren’t dirty, today’s politicians are.

I recall the media exposing a $2-million SBA loan default by Neil Bush. Opposition politics should have been practiced more vigorously there. The failure of Whitewater’s lender, Madison S&L;, cost taxpayers about $55 million. Exposing potential scandal and abuse of the public treasury is one of the few good and proper political acts we see these days.

AUDIE L. PRICE

Long Beach

* With reference to news accounts of the President’s Whitewater situation and your Times Mirror Center for People and the Press survey, Jan. 15: I think the survey must have been taken in a cemetery or some such place. Those acquaintances I chat with are keenly interested and ready to comment on Clinton and the innuendoes which surround him.

JOHN CUTTS

Escondido

* Does Lars-Erik Nelson (Column Left, Jan. 11) believe that the President of this great country would for some reason not get a fair hearing? He states, “He can’t count on the fairness of an impartial investigation,” and “in Whitewater, the Republicans have a powerful weapon” that can be used “again and again.”

What weapon? If the President has nothing to conceal, what’s the problem? Would not the documents he now possesses clear him and his associates of any wrongdoing?

PAUL A. ZERBE JR.

Palmdale