With all due respect to my fellow Point Loma native and Point Loma High School graduate Mari Hamlin Fink’s quixotic plan to run against U.S. Rep. Susan Davis as the 53rd Congressional District’s GOP nominee — well, good luck with that (“Fink makes bid for Davis’ House seat,” Jan. 28 Peninsula Beacon, page 1). Davis has been an excellent fit with the district; progressive, hard-working and thoughtful, and richly deserves to be re-elected. Fink’s shopworn chant that she’d like to “limit spending” and would like to bring “some real change” (blah, blah) is laughable. As we’re reminded almost every day in news out of Washington, Republican leaders don’t want change. They want things to stay the same, or better, to revert to the 1950s. The only “change” they desperately seek is to replace the current Democratic administration, at seemingly any cost to the nation, with their own. They want yet more tax cuts for the already well-off and fewer social programs for everyone else. Health-care reform, as Fink mentions? Oh, my gosh, the GOP is really committed to that one. And now that they’ve spent the U.S. into a $1 trillion-plus deficit under George W. Bush’s disastrous leadership, Republicans suddenly yearn for fiscal restraint by President Barack Obama. They’re such a gang of hypocrites it’s hardly worth even pointing it out any more. I don’t mean to impugn Ms. Fink personally. She’s probably a perfectly intelligent, reasonable, public-minded person. She could even be a political moderate like Davis, which this mixed district historically prefers. Trouble is, the term “moderate Republican” is now an oxymoron. GOP leaders won’t permit it. Any Republican elected today must be whipped and browbeaten and harangued into a conga line behind the right-wing, conservative, backward-looking extremists and obstructionists who now run the party. That ain’t gonna fly in the 53rd District — and for good reason.