Letter to the Editor

GOP still pushing 'stay the course'

When the shoe is on the other foot it feels uncomfortable.

After losing the popularity contest by some half a million votes in 2000, George W. Bush was appointed to the presidency by the Supreme Court and governed as though he had won a huge landslide. In 2004 he was finally elected president amid an array of circumstances that would have caused any election in a developing country to be declared transparently fraudulent by the free world. Bush then declared he had another mandate and promised to spend the capital he dreamed he had won.

Now a real landslide has fallen massively in the opposite direction, and the Republican Party received, as Bush acknowledged, a "thumpin'." But Bush and right-wing extremist politicians and commentators claim the Democrats have no mandate for change. Admittedly opposition to the war in Iraq was the primary focus as voters repudiated the culture of corruption and the rubber-stamp Republican Congress, but to deny that the Democrats have a mandate for change is to deny their main campaign slogan.

In throwing Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to the wolves, Bush finally recognized public opposition to his policies, but he seems to think voters are stupid enough to infer Rumsfeld acted alone (remind me again: where does the buck stop~). Despite warm and fuzzy talk about cooperation, Bush is urging his lame-duck Congress to ram through stay-the-course legislation that denies the thumping.

I hope the Democrats stop this last insane gasp.

ALAN R.P. JOURNET, Cape Girardeau