Republicans' wayward turns

As a lifelong Republican and a supporter of the tea party movement, I always have been labeled right-wing. However, lately, I've come to realize that I'm being outdistanced to the right because there are issues being defended and promoted by our party that are simply indefensible. Here are just a few:

We don't need the government regulating our health care industry.

Right. As an employer who has seen the cost of health insurance reach unaffordable levels for our employees and limitations on coverage become par for their issuance, I've come to realize just how indefensible this statement is. Private insurers are complicit in making insurance unaffordable and remain complicit in the process that resulted in the forced passage of "Obamacare."

The easier route would have been to simply expand Medicare to the entire population on an actuarially sound basis and provide voluntary access with premiums based on income. Mandate the premium payment at the time of the injury, accident or illness that takes a citizen to any federally or state-funded hospital or clinic if they don't have any coverage. Have the plan compete with the private insurers that have no real competition today and see what happens to rates — problem solved.

Kick out every illegal immigrant.

Sure. It would only take every border patrol and immigration agent in the United States catching roughly 10,000 illegal immigrants per week 20 years to round them all up. And that is assuming that we can stop the inflow completely, find them, catch them, hold them, and bus them home. Get serious.

Start by distinguishing between the 60-year-old immigrant who has been here working underground to build a better life for him or herself verses the 25-year-old immigrant who just crossed over to deliver drugs.

Once you start the process of actually distinguishing the difference of the immigrants and come to the realization that we can never get them all out of this country, you'll find yourself arriving at the same conclusion that President Reagan did. Allow those who have worked or studied hard and never had any felonies to get a work permit to remain as long as they want to work, provide them with basic rights and a legal framework to earn residency — not citizenship, but allow them to pay taxes, penalize those employers who enslaved them in their underground economy, allow them to become part of our economy, and then concentrate all of your efforts on rounding up the criminal elements of this population and throwing them out.

We don't need any more foreigners coming here.

Totally wrong. We should do everything in our power to keep foreigners here who benefit this nation. A student who obtains a graduate degree in any discipline should receive a personal invitation from our attorney general to sign on the dotted line and become a permanent legal resident of the United States of America on graduation day. This is the future of our world.

Science, technology, engineering, math, human studies and even anthropology, whatever — we need the most educated population living and thriving and enjoying capitalism here — not back in Brazil, Russia, India, China, Canada, England, Australia or, yes, even the Middle East (gasp).

We should also expand the quota of business-visitor and residency visas allowing higher-income, capital-producing earners to become residents here today.

If a Chinese national would like to invest $500,000 in a business in the United States or buy a home in a depressed housing market, get him over here ASAP. We need him, and he needs us. Capitalism at its best.

We should introduce democracy in the Middle East.

Give me a break.

The first lesson we used to learn in school is that democracy is earned, never given. There are countries in the world that simply cannot have a functioning democracy today, and I include my birth country of Pakistan on that list. The nation has gone to hell because of a complete lack of any social fabric or safety net for its population. As a result, the mass of people are either completely uneducated or educated by radicals.

Do you really think that a nation whose majority lives in abject poverty and to whom the concept of death provides a better alternative than the reality of life is ready for a one-person, one-vote democratic process that will result in one of their own in charge of the nuclear armaments of that country? I think not.

There are some countries that are simply not ready to be a democracy until and unless they reach a point where their own people crave humanity-based processes for their own social fabric. I'm sorry, but Egypt, Syria, Libya and Pakistan, to name a few, are simply not ready for a "democratic" government forced upon them unless we're prepared to recognize radical Islam as a "democratic" form of representation.

Here we are on the eve of one of the most important elections of certainly my lifetime and we're passing McCarthy-type laws, debating lawn-service vendors, border fences, migrant worker roundups, infidelity and medieval abortion restrictions as the primary qualifiers for our nominee.

It's time to wake up to the economic abyss we face if we lose this election and realize that we need to start recognizing the folly of our ways if we're going to successfully win not only the White House but the seats necessary in the Senate to actually protect our economic and social freedoms from further erosion.

I urge each of our candidates in the Republican Party to stop defending the indefensible and start defending the ideals that made this nation the greatest nation on the planet.

We should do everything in our power to lower the cost of health care and expand the ability of all citizens to be provided with coverage, even if it means a government-sponsored program as an alternative to the "robber-baron" mentality of our current private insurers, including the forced lowering of costs of vital, life-saving drugs.

We should recognize that we have an obligation to provide a social safety net for those who are less fortunate, and we have an obligation to pay for it.

Finally, we need to recognize there are countries in this world that we are going to have to build a relationship with because of their sheer size and economic prowess.

China will be a global superpower in a matter of years. Instead of engaging in rhetoric about how to diminish its ability, we need to start engaging with the country as an economic equal so we're better prepared to deal with them as a global superpower when that day finally comes.

We really owe it to ourselves and, frankly, the entire planet to recapture the moral and fiscal high ground that we have lost over the last several years, and I urge Republicans to resist the urge to compromise our core values to the popular rhetoric that is currently in fashion.