The Feb. 25 letter to the editor from Ron Peititte is as offensive as it is absurd.
His tirade is the same worn-out rhetoric that pollutes the airwaves from right-wing hate radio and Fox News. For the past eight years, Republican ideologues controlled the White House. They controlled both houses of Congress for 14 of the past 16 years.
The past two years saw Democrats controlling Congress, but only with the slightest of margins, and Republicans effectively blocked most things they wanted or tried to do. In addition, hundreds of political ideologues and special-interest minions tutored by Karl Rove permeated the top ranks of every governmental agency, subveting public good to corporate and ideological interests.
Republicans ran the bus into the ditch, leaving a trail of financial disaster and a mountain of debt. They epitomize the old saying “the person who can smile when things go wrong has already figured out who to blame it on.” Unfortunately, they lack either the character or integrity to accept any responsibility or acknowledge their colossal failures.
Republicans have been like drunken sailors out on the town for the night with somebody else’s credit card. They inherited a budget surplus from President Bill Clinton, squandered it and left the largest deficit and growth in government in the history our country.
In November, citizens finally had enough and turned many Republicans out of office, and rejected their phony and hypocritical “country first” mantra. Now as a minority party, they assume a self-righteous arrogant posture that they are the party of fiscal responsibility, small government and are all for the little guy.
They have been screwing the little guy for so long while lining the pockets of the top 2 percent, that their newfound fiscal austerity is comical. The only thing they offer is more of the same failed incompetent policies that created the mess we are in. To advance their partisan political agenda, they sit on the sidelines marching lockstep with a buffoon like Rush Limbaugh and a national “insurgency” strategy instead of doing anything meaningful to help fix the disaster they created.
Their political campaign proclamations of how they had “reached across the aisle and would make that their highest priority if re-elected” was a king-sized mound of horse manure. The only bright spots in the Republican party can be found in the governers of California, Florida and a few other states, where they seem to be able to apply reason and common sense — and have the courage and conviction to do what is right for their citizens instead of following the national Republican leadership off a cliff like a bunch of mindless lemmings.
Hopefully, when mid-term elections come, more Republican ideologues will be turned out, and people who truly put country first will replace them. In the meantime, the angry bubba crowd like Ron Peititte will continue their intellectually-challenged rants, ignoring the fact that much of the mortgage and housing crisis has been created from decent hard-working people losing their jobs, small businesses being suffocated and having their life snuffed out by economic armageddon, and bankruptcy caused by medical bills that crushed people who could no longer afford health insurance with 30 percent-plus annual premium increases.
Peititte would do well to remember the old saying “There but by the grace of God go I” instead of whining about the fact he didn’t get anything because he was fortunate enough not to have lost a job or had his retirement wiped out by the meltdown of the stock market. I would much rather see “tax and spend” than the Republican approach of “spend and let somebody else figure out how to pay for it.”
Jerry Vaughn, Federal Way
