To the Editor:
If you don’t call a problem what it is, you can’t fix it. David Brooks’s column would have been a home run but for his timidity about naming the problem. He wrote that “the Senate” says it won’t hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee. No, the pathologically petty majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who didn’t even wait for Justice Antonin Scalia’s body to get cold, announced, unequivocally, that he would not hold hearings. Then Mr. McConnell’s minions all fell in line behind him.
Mr. Brooks wrote that “politicians” live in fear of compromising. No, “Republican politicians” live in that fear. It reminds me of when I was a child. My older brother would beat me up and my mother would say, “I want you two to stop fighting.” Mr. Brooks writes as though both parties were equally complicit in the demise of our political discourse. The genesis of this destructive trend was Ronald Reagan’s mantra that “government is the problem.” Roger Ailes picked it up from there and spawned Fox “News.” A problem without a name can’t be fixed.
SARA R. NICHOLS
Los Angeles
Note from KBJ: No American politician has been less willing to compromise than Barack Obama. Sara Nichols is living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
