Moral Collapse of the Republican Party

Reading accounts of the death of President John F. Kennedy always makes me cry, but your article, "A city and the nation shocked" (Nov. 21) broke my heart. The story itself is sad, but what really hit me was the quote by William E. Miller, spokesman for the Republicans convening at Hotel Jefferson at the time of Kennedy's assassination. Mr. Miller said they took down the "Beat Kennedy" banner because "We are Americans first and Republicans second."

The hijacking of that party of Republican patriots by today's corporate masters and radical anti-government extremists is one of the saddest stories in our history. I was a Republican back when President Eisenhower sent U.S. soldiers to guard black students attending what had been an all-white high school in Little Rock. I was a proud Republican when President Nixon signed the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and established the Environmental Protection Agency.

When Ronald Reagan was running for president, I read about his idea of "trickle down economics" and knew the country was in big trouble. Now we are paying the piper. The gap between the ultra rich and the rest of us is as wide as it was in the Great Depression, and the party I was once so proud to call my own now has only one goal -- destroying the administration of the current president regardless of the damage to America.

After 9/11, we all rallied around President George W. Bush because we're Americans first. Huge tax cuts and two unfunded wars later, we are facing bankruptcy. President Barack Obama is trying to rebuild an economy massacred by greedy financiers who have no allegiance to our nation. They robbed our pensions and savings. They sliced and diced our home mortages and then bet against our ability to repay them. And now those pulling the strings in Washington say we should all "share the pain." Sadly, there's no way the people in control of the Republican Party today would say "We're Americans first and Republicans Second."

Published in St. Louis Post Dispatch, Nov. 2010