Letter Sent To PowerLine

Dear Mr John H. Hinderaker , Scott W. Johnson , and Paul Mirengoff :

One of the problems the Republican Party (and Conservatism) faces is restoring peoples' faith. By this I mean the Republican Party supposedly stood for the principles of fiscal responsibility, minimum interference in individuals' lives, limited government (not the same as minimum interference in people's lives), prosperity and the restoration of morality in government. The Republican Party has failed on all of these accounts. It is easy to blame George W. Bush for this, but the Party went along with him for two terms without protest. This has brought us to the brink of disaster as a country.

Fiscal responsibility has been abandoned and our country's debt is the highest it's ever been. We see meddling in peoples' lives on a regular basis, including adopting the right-to-life position and the Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage. Limited government has been a joke since Reagan, with the current government being the largest ever. Prosperity is another joke with even the richest people I know wondering where the bottom is. As for morality in government, the Republicans certainly racked up a majority of the criminal and moral infringements in the last two terms. Not that the Democrats haven't had their faults.

Neil Gabler has written that the true Republican tradition is McCarthyism, scaring people, and he makes a good case of it. The concomitant of this is that, instead of criticizing everything the Democrats do, presenting positive believable programs would make the Republicans believable once more. Instead, from McCain to Palin, to your own blog, you harp on the negatives, nitpicking everything the Democrats do (the latest contretemps being what Obama said or didn't to the Governor of Illinois when it's obvious he wouldn't "pay to play", as caught on the quote from the wire that Obama was a "F-blanker." It's easy to criticize when you're not really doing deep thinking about this great country of ours; it's too easy to blame it all, and I mean everything wrong, on the Democrats and not assume any responsibility for the Republicans.

I urge you to abandon the McCarthy scare tactics, trying to besmirch the Democratic Party as it tries to fix our country, which is why they were voted in, because you ought to face it, by being negative you border on being self-destructive, and if you want to face more economic loss and more fiscal destruction of our country, just keep it up, forget about really helping, and find you're losing everybody but the ignorant and the truly angry.

I think Republican and Conservative principles, if truly enforced, can be a fine moral structure to run a country on; but you have to mean it, not just propagandize it; and you have to make it believable and workable.