Where Are The Pissed Off Republicans And Why Are They Not More Vocal?

Letters to the Editor are fun. Here's a few that cause me to ponder the question that is the title to this post. I'm pasting in the whole of the one's from today's SF Chronicle because the breadth if interesting juxtaposed with each other.

Enjoy:

The Republican Party has left me

Editor - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is right on target in his criticism of the Republican Party. I registered as a Republican in 1946, on my 21st birthday. I was a Republican before most of the delegates to the Republican convention were born. I have not left the Republican Party. The party has left me.

To me, a conservative is someone who wants to conserve what is good, and change what is bad. That is not what it means to the people who now dominate the party. They want a way of life that may be consistent with life in 1807, but has nothing to do with 2007. They are completely out of touch with reality. Global warming? A myth spread by left-wing tree-huggers. Evolution? An anti-Christian creed spread by atheists.

The Republican Party needs new leaders: people who accept science, and are not locked into fundamentalist religion. If it does not change, it will go the way of the Whigs, the Know Nothings, and other vestiges of the past. I am not comfortable with the Democratic Party, but I find that now I am even more uncomfortable with the Republican Party.

ALFRED HEXTER
Kensington

Really, I don't find much conservative about the current batch of supposed "compassionate conservatives" either.

Certainly, those worried about getting killed by foreign terrorists don't live in our nation's ghettos:

At a crossroad

Editor - For the people of Richmond:

I am a slave
To the man in the grave
"It's revenge I crave,"
say the young and the brave

Spending the best years
Wiping your mother's tears
Soothing your sister's fears
Until the moment nears

When you have a gun in your hand.
Your future is planned
You're not taking a stand
When others demand,

"It's an eye for an eye."
Do you ask why?
If you don't ask why, another will die.
Is it time for another drive-by?

You walk closer to the ride
A symbol of gang pride
The last man who sat there died
Your two worlds collide

Your conscience or the gun
Your mother's last son
The clock has begun
To stand or to run

To lock and load
You're at a crossroad
The clock has slowed
Courage showed

I was a slave
To the man in the grave
Then I forgave
It was my life to save

ANTHONY OERTEL
San Rafael

And this reader raises an interesting question about the supposed "coalition of the willing."

Help from abroad

Editor - If the sole remaining rationalization for leaving U.S. troops in harm's way in Iraq is to prevent more inter-sectarian bloodshed than we've already unleashed by bumbling in, why is our president not calling on the international community - especially the Arab states - to help quell the violence?

ALLAN MANN
Alameda

And, in the odd event you've not known Phil Frank's work, you may want to google the man. His comic strips were splendid.

Missing Phil Frank

Editor - I cried Friday morning, reading the front page of The Chronicle on my way upstairs with the paper. Like many other members of the Bay Area comics community, I knew Phil Frank. Like his beloved strip, he was warm, funny, politically right-on, and very San Franciscan, without one ounce of mean-spiritedness. If The Chronicle can continue to run Peanuts in perpetuity, can't you do the same for Farley?

TRINA ROBBINS
San Francisco