Letters to the Editor

Wobbly Republicans

Wesley Pruden’s column “The master plan for party suicide” (Pruden on Politics, Nation, June 17) refers to fallout for Democrats over the treasonous ranting of Sen. Richard J. Durbin. In light of subsequent events, the headline might better apply to Republicans. As usual, the Republican Party surrendered the moral and political high ground to the losers when Sen. Bill Frist cravenly accepted Mr. Durbin’s phony apology.

Republicans talk tough about the war, radical judges, illegal aliens, affirmative action and term limits. Once elected, though, they thumb their noses at the voters and hide behind liberal power grabs. The American people have completely lost control of their government.

It is time for a counterliberal revolution, but this latest Republican capitulation shows that the feckless Republican Party is incompetent to lead it. Timid and submissive, the Republican Party remains viable only as the nominal home of the conservative movement. Conservatives must lead the revolution from a new party (New Federalist or Originalist?) unfettered by the baggage of existing parties, as the Republicans once did: Several years after its founding, the old firebrand, idea-driven Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln for the presidency.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt demagogued that Republicans caused the Great Depression, and the abuse has continued unabated ever since. As a result, the Republican Party assumed a permanent loser mentality, mealy mouthed, falsely objective, content to win elections for their own sakes while deferentially tugging its forelock to Democrats. Republicans routinely cave in to the likes of Mr. Durbin while destroying their own leaders’ conservative agendas.

The new party must ignore the vicious liberal media and calls for “compassion.” Its candidates and leaders should never have served in any state or national capacity in government or another party. Devolution into a big-government pork factory would be arrested by internal term limits, the conservative agenda protected by harsh penalties for McCain-esque mavericks who sup with the enemy.

If conservatives cannot sweep into power as Old Abe’s Republicans once did, America will continuetodegenerate: swamped by illegals, ruled by radical judges, constantly threatened by zealots. It’s time to rescue America in spite of Mr. Durbin and other America-haters, and, for that matter, in spite of Mr. Frist and Republicans’ compulsion to surrender.

MARK PETRINA

Chicago