Jerry Flagel, a lifelong Republican, sent me a letter the other day about what he called "a threat to our nation's future."

Enclosed in the letter was evidence — a mass political mailing. Flagel, a retired engineer outside Renton, got it in the mail last week.

"I don't think people realize how bad it is; that's why I sent it to you," Flagel said when I called. "These people have no intentions of trying to fix our nation's problems. There's no attempt at coming up with any solutions."

All this sounds like typical political trash talk about the other side. Except: Flagel's beef is with his own party.

The mailing he sent me, from the Republican National Committee, is all about obstructionism and name-calling. Barack Obama, for example, is repeatedly labeled a socialist and the "most far-left President in American history."

But the letter is most revealing in its laying out of the party's principles. You can sum it up in one word: "no."

No aid to banks or car companies. No tax increases. No stimulus measures. No cuts in military. No troop pullbacks.

The mailing is impressively contorted to be against stuff.

"Should we resist Barack Obama's proposal to spend billions of federal taxpayer dollars to pay 'volunteers' to perform his chosen tasks?" it asks.

You mean like road work?

Then there are examples of the party's deep denial.

"Should Republicans work to keep our pro-growth achievements from the past eight years by blocking new regulation and red tape?"



Pro-growth achievements from the past eight years? Are we living on the same planet?

I bring all this up to you for the same reason Flagel brought it up to me — as a sort of shout into the political wilderness. Can Republicans please get serious?

"I don't agree with a lot of what Obama is doing, because I'm more conservative than he is," said Flagel, who voted for George W. Bush twice. But Obama "seems to have some intelligence about governing. He's trying to work through problems. The Republicans just seem to say: 'I want more of mine and to heck with everybody else.' "

That was the sense I got from last week's protest Tea Parties, too. I'm on the tea partyers' side about how the federal budget deficits are a generational disaster. What I didn't hear was: What are we going to do about it?

There aren't many options beyond raising taxes or big cuts to Medicare, Social Security and probably the military. Yet the tea partyers don't touch that. They shout for lower taxes. Even though the burden from income taxes already is the lowest it's been in three decades.

When I wrote a column chastising Obama for sending us yet another tax rebate, I also called on him to make entitlement spending cuts. More money in or less money out or both — that's what it's going to take to end the credit binge we're on. For this I got called a socialist. Derided as a hopeless liberal weenie.

Yes, name-calling is part of politics. That's not what bugs me.

It's that we're having a bit of a crisis. So where are the ideas to solve it? Obama's got some. But we need some from the other side. Surely Republicans could offer up something more substantive than the trolls in our Web site's comment threads?

"It's sad," Flagel says. "There's no attempt to say — 'let's put forward our own plans.' It seems so far from what the Republican Party used to be about."

Sounds about where the Democrats were five years back. Shrieking at Bush and little else. Until a guy named Obama pulled them out of that funk.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday.