Chronicle to Bush -- Repudiate Your Principles To Unite Country

With exit polls showing that moral issues were a key issue for American voters who returned President Bush to office, the Houston Chronicle had this little bit of advice to offer him.

Bush could demonstrate his sincere desire for a more united nation by discouraging the use of wedge issues and spurious constitutional amendments that have no chance of passage and would erode states' prerogatives and individual rights if they were adopted. When he has an opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice, as he soon might, Bush could nominate a jurist who is respected on both sides of the aisle, one likely to respect the precedent set by Roe v. Wade.

So, what needs to happen is that the President needs to repudiate the voice of the majority that elected him in order to gain the support and cooperation of those who will never support or cooperate with him!

But then they go on.

Bush will need a measure of Democratic cooperation to battle the problems the nation faces: uncontrolled deficits that could hobble the economy; an insurance crisis that threatens the health care and solvency of middle-class families and the profitability of the companies they work for; widespread resentment of U.S. foreign policy around the world, particularly among Arabs and Muslims who prefer tyranny and chaos to U.S. hegemony.

Yeah, I suspect he would need some help from the Democrats to battle many of those "problems the nation faces," which appear to have been taken word for word from the Democrat Platform adopted in Boston this summer.

But most disgusting is the unwarranted cheap shot at Talmadge Heflin, whose defeat had been a major goal and editorial policy of the Houston Chronicle for months.

While liberals might seem to have more to gain from a conservative administration's offer of harmonious cooperation, conservatives also must adapt and bend or be supplanted. Southwest Houston, where a Democratic newcomer unseated the Republican chairman of the Texas House Appropriations Committee, offers a telling example. Perhaps the constituents of the diverse district found appealing Hubert Vo's history as a hardworking immigrant. Perhaps they resented state Rep. Talmadge Heflin's family values. These include making it harder for some children to get health insurance, and using the courts in an unjust attempt to take a child away from its mother.

Kicking a man when he's down, and using half-truths to do it is pretty low -- but typical of those who set policy for that paper.