Stumbling Toward the Light

Letters to the Editor/Inbox Time Magazine Time & Life Building New York, NY 10020

Attn: Richard Stengel, Managing Editor Dear Mr. Stengel:

Former Republican Senator John Sununu's meretricious column "It's Obama's Downgrade" in your issue of August 29th cannot go unanswered. His assertion that President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership in Congress are solely to blame for the recent economic policy debacles in Washington willfully ignores his own party's far larger role.

in the first place, even if we only discuss future debt rather than current or previous, much of it is for wars Sununu and his party got us into in Iraq and Afghanistan; the cost of extricating our troops from what are now internal civil wars—and of caring for the wounded coming home from them—would not even exist without their choices in the past decade to send the troops there. Second, the financial crisis took most of a decade of GOP-driven non-enforcement on securities fraud and predatory lending to bring about; no President of either party or philosophy, nor any Congress run by either, can hope to turn a disaster of such magnitude into prosperity within a scant two years in office, or even the four years the Democrats controlled Congress (2006-2010). And it was his party's mule-headed opposition to any and all revenue increases, coupled with their willingness to bring further economic ruin upon the country for the sake of their rich donors' wallets, that prevented enactment of debt reductions sufficient to satisfy the unelected, self-appointed arbiters of our economic destiny at Standard & Poor's.

The Bible (which many of Sununu's GOP confreres seem to think should guide our policy more than the Constitution) reminds us not to worry about the splinter in our neighbor's eye before we've removed the plank in our own. Sununu needs an optical 2x4-ectomy, stat...and if he thinks voters won't remember next November which party was really at fault, numerous recent media polls on the subject ought to have shown him otherwise. Even if the (barely) most credible candidate gets the GOP nomination for next year—Mitt Romney, most likely—he will still have the devil's own time overcoming this bald fact. And as the late sainted GOP icon Ronald Reagan famously observed, "facts are stubborn things." Sincerely, TCC