On The Political Spectrum, We Are Told That We Are All “Red” or “Blue,” Or Maybe That We should be “Purple”– If All Those Colors Are Taken, And They All Mean “Corporatist” Plus Spending More On War, Maybe We Need A New Color!

Relentlessly "Red" or "Blue"? Aren't there other colors in the political spectrum that don't mean "corporatism"?

If anything should convince us faster of how completely we are coaxed to relentlessly play the “Red Team/Blue Team” game of politics, it probably should be the way that we don’t talk in terms of any other colors to describe the political spectrum.  Matt Taibbi is one of our political observers who notes the that the “Red Team/Blue Team” divisions are designed to encourage the kind of knee-jerk rooting for your chosen “team” that turns off critical thinking and escalates the kind of passions that obscure and interfere with the ability to discern and build upon common interests.  In fact, the cover of Taibbi’s new book, “Hate Inc.,” about how the corporate mass media routinely fuels anger and division in this country confirms the importance of the Red/Blue color meme representing division in half red and half blue.

More honestly, as I have been writing about here in National Notice, the bigger truth is that the public is largely united on most of the most important issues, with huge supermajorities of the public agreeing on what they want for country on a score of those most important issues even while elected officials refuse to provide those things and the corporate press backs those electeds up by relentlessly messaging that these are things that the public can’t expect to have.

Notwithstanding these commonalities, we are being sold the notion that we are divided.  Right after the 2016 election, on the eve of the presidential inauguration, PBS’s seemingly sober and authoritative Frontline rushed in to explain to us that we were in turmoil was because we are a divided nation, broadcasting its “Divided States of America” on January 17, 2017.  More recently, Frontline is back again with more of the same, broadcasting a few weeks ago, “America’s Great Divide: From Obama to Trump,” January 14, 2020.  Not only are we being sold on the idea of these false divides, we are being sold on the idea that the divide is between, and must be thought about in terms of, “red” and “blue,” or “Republican” versus “Democrat.”

Meanwhile, some observers whom I consider more astute because they are thinking the way I do (how is that for my own personal confirmation bias?) are not seeing the poles of the political spectrum in those terms at all.  They see the ranging of opinions in terms of populism versus corporatism, or populism/Democratic Socialism versus corporatist/Neoliberalism. On this spectrum, Trump was elected delivering faux populist promises and, with a switcheroo that he vaguely still tries to deflect attention from, has delivered corporatist crony capitalism, kleptocracy, and more neoliberalism.  Bernie Sanders can, in this light, be seen as a candidate that has more in common with Trump for what Trump initially promised, which explains the attraction of Sanders for so many who once voted for Trump.

Seeing the spectrum this way, both the Republicans and the Nancy Pelosi/Hillary Clinton Democrats represent the corporations and the wealthy global cooperate elite, and both “red” and “blue” are colors that stand for the pursuit of cooperate interests adverse to the general public.  In the case of climate change catastrophe chaos and militarism, these interest are very likely even completely adverse to the continuing survival of mankind and life on this planet.

If we can only now be politically defined in terms of those two pre-selected colors, I think we need some new colors.  Occasionally, when we are not being told how hopelessly divided we are as a country when we are actually not, we are paternalistically told that, rather than being so extreme, we should migrate to somewhere in the political spectrum that’s between, to the color “purple,” viewed as somehow moderate, or maybe even “independent” thinking.  That’s what’s going on with the Purple Project for Democracy.  It has a catchy slogan, “We The Purple,” conveying that it somehow reflects populism, and it bills itself as a “strictly non-partisan, apolitical effort,” but it is a top-down oriented plan for a corporate media coalition to start dictating what should be considered reliable theoretically middle of the road media.  In other words, it is an effort by entities such as The Washington Post, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Hearst newspapers, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, NPR to speak with a more unified and authoritative voice to marginalize the noncorporate reporting and viewpoints that compete with their own.

If “red” represents corporatism and “blue” represents corporatism, then “purple” is just more corporatism that is theoretically peacefully without the “Red Team/Blue Team” squabbling and hate that the media typically conjures up.  A sort of spiritual “corporatism”?  Purple has long been a color identified with spiritualism.  The “purple” they want to sell us instead represents more efforts to separate us from any genuine populism-building narratives.

We obviously need a new color, or new colors.  I should note that one color, green, has already been taken by an alternative party, the Green Party, with a strong identification with, and platform built on, environmentalism.  Rather than just suggest that this is the answer, although the green party has important answers, I’d rather suggest that we go with something not quite so predefined and perhaps not so automatically associated with the environment. "Yellow" might have negative connotations when the path needs to be courageous.  Perhaps, the hard to define color of "teal"?

One other thing we need to change, along with the introduction of new colors, is the way that we hold our elections.  The way that we hold our elections is part of the reason that we only hear about “red” and “blue.”  The way that we currently hold our elections locks us into the rigid constriction of the  duopoly and ensures that it is easy for the corporations to buy off the only two parties who are only theoretically competing. Along with a new political color or colors, we need to be instituting changes that give third parties, parties like the Green Party, a change to rise, strengthen, and become truly competitive when they have valid and important ideas. . .  very likely the ideas that reflect the reasonably longings of huge supermajorities of the population-- That means changes like instant runoff elections, and proportional representation.

The First Most Obvious Tax To Eliminate If You Want To Increase Employment: The Payroll Tax

It seems pretty obvious that the U.S. economy needs to create more jobs. So obvious that there’s an obvious fix that ought to be considered: elimination of payroll taxes. Taxation is necessary as the price of civilization but in the world of taxation it is axiomatic that what you tax you will get less of. So look at what you tax. Do you really want to tax employment?

Headlines on Dwindling Employment: Fewer and Lower-Paying Jobs

The headlines rolling in about national employment, or the lack thereof, make it clear the situation is sensationally bad and headed for worse. There aren’t enough jobs and the majority of those that exist need to be better paying At the meager rate that the U.S. economy is creating jobs, the relatively good job figures reflected by the uptick of jobs in the September jobs report (103,000 new jobs, better than the number of jobs added over the summer) will not be enough to keep pace with the growth in population. Consequently, if job creation only remains at this level, and there is reason to think it won’t even do that, the nation’s unemployment rate will not go down from 9.1 percent. That's already unacceptably high. If the job creation numbers return to where they have been recently the unemployment rate will rise.

The reason to think job creation figures could likely head down again is that real household income is declining and this, as previously pointed out in an earlier National Notice article, is likely to lead to a downward spiral, particularly as it cycles through real estate values that could be very similar to the dynamic during the first Great Depression.

Continuing High Unemployment Rate, Perhaps Headed Up

Here from the headlines:

The New York Times on the last job report: Adding Jobs, but Not Many, U.S. Economy Seems to Idle, by Motoka Rich, October 7, 2011

The economy is not growing fast enough to bring down the unemployment rate, which held steady at 9.1 percent in September. Local governments and school districts are cutting large numbers of workers. And about a third of the jobs added by the private sector last month were actually 45,000 Verizon workers who had been on strike during August and were simply returning to work.

American Public Radio’s Marketplace about the same report: Jobs added in September, By Mitchell Hartman, Friday, October 7, 2011. Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman interviewed economist Kevin Hassett at the American Enterprise Institute who thinks:

. . . . we'll plateau around 100,000 new jobs a month for the foreseeable future.

And he interviewed Harvard economist Lawrence Katz to conclude that this means “the unemployment rate won't budge and the six million long-term unemployed won't get back on the job,” or in Katz’s own words:

The modest job growth that we've seen is just about what you need to keep up with population growth. It's not enough to bring people back to work.

6.7 Percent- Falling Average Income

At the same time the Times is reporting about declining incomes that “between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent”: Recession Officially Over, U.S. Incomes Kept Falling, by Robert Pear, October 9, 2011:

In a grim sign of the enduring nature of the economic slump, household income declined more in the two years after the recession ended than it did during the recession itself, new research has found.

* * *

That reduction occurred even though the unemployment rate fell slightly, to 9.2 percent in June compared with 9.5 percent two years earlier. Two main forces appear to have held down pay: the number of people outside the labor force — neither working nor looking for work — has risen; and the hourly pay of employed people has failed to keep pace with inflation, as the prices of oil products and many foods have jumped.

During the recession itself, by contrast, wage gains outpaced inflation.

One reason pay has stagnated is that many people who lost their jobs in the recession — and remained out of work for months — have taken pay cuts in order to be hired again.

Here is the Times graph: Declining Household Income, October 9, 2011.

Eliminating or Reducing Payroll Taxes Means What?

Proposing to eliminate or reduce payroll taxes does not mean to eliminate income taxes or associated income tax withholding procedures. Instead the proposal is to eliminate or significantly reduce the cost of Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance.

Do it Long Term and Across the Board

Employment often is and needs to be a long-term relationship (among other things it is not always easy for employers to quickly fire people) so, to be meaningful, any reduction or elimination of these taxes would have to be long-term and assured and understood to be long-term when implemented. The adjustments should also be broad-based, applying to all workers: In other words the temptation to tinker around the margins and reduce taxes only for `newly-created’ or `added’ jobs should be rejected. That’s just too complicated and leads to all sorts of senseless and unhelpful accounting ruses to qualify.

Social Security Structure Remaining Intact

Elimination of these payroll taxes does not mean having to change the Social Security Trust structure. The same amounts would have to be deposited into the trust to keep it actuarially sound but the moneys would have to come from somewhere else. Payouts to retired workers who worked more years and earned more would still be greater, just as under the current system. That means that more payments would have to go into the system when the economy was booming and more workers were working, but isn’t this the exactly the kind of problem/challenge that it is good to have?

Medicare and Unemployment Insurance

By the same token, all that is good about or bad about the formulas pursuant to which money is set aside for Medicare or as unemployment insurance could remain intact, but to the extent that these formulae don’t make sense they could be changed. It does make sense to save against a rainy day and, when the economy is good, set aside funds for the payout of unemployment benefits in the future. But that doesn’t mean that an actuarial relationship can be exactly calibrated or that payout of unemployment benefits shouldn’t be continued when the economy is especially bad.

On the other hand, does it make sense that Medicare taxes should be based on employment at all, that employers should perceive the (future) provision of healthcare, generally, for persons over 65 (currently) to be a cost of employing additional workers? In fact, what proper relationship should there be between healthcare and employment at all? To the extent that healthcare (fostered by special tax treatment- i.e. by excluding employer-provided healthcare benefits from income taxation- or whatever) is viewed as an essential incident to employment then, healthcare costing what it does today, gums up the employment economy. It makes it much harder for employers and employees who are otherwise a good fit for each other to match up for the right reasons.

A Revenue Shortfall That Would Need To Be Addressed?

If payroll taxes were cut back wouldn’t a resulting shortfall in revenue need to be addressed? Yes, in the long term. (Economists are diagnosing the economy to be troubled by a lack of consumer demand so pumping income into consumers’ pockets without addressing it immediately might make sense right now.) But it would not necessarily need to be addressed in the immediate term, during a bad economy, when we are deficit financing all sorts of other things like the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

Where would the foregone payroll taxes be made up? Anywhere that makes sense. Arguments are being made that the wealthy, the corporations, and the profits they are making should not be taxed because they are the nation’s self-described “job creators” even if, when given the opportunity, they choose to do other things with their extra cash rather than create jobs. Instead of trying to create jobs by not taxing income flowing to wealthy theoretical job creators, it makes sense simply to tax actual job creation less by eliminating payroll taxes.

Payroll Taxes vs. Income Taxes: The Wealthy vs. the Rest of Us

What if it was decided that the resulting shortfall in revenue could be made up nowhere except by an increase in income taxes? Would increased income taxes wind up being essentially just a reversal of the cut on payroll taxes? Are payroll taxes just the same as income taxes? No: Income taxes include taxes on capital gains and investment income. Further, income taxes can and should be progressive with the wealthier paying at a higher rate than the poor and middle class. Payroll taxes are regressive with the poor and middle class paying a higher percentage of their taxed pay than the wealthy.

Don’t taxes on income, like taxes on payroll, result in less employment when people don't seek employment because the salary paid in income will be taxed? Are income taxes paid by an employee securing employment the same as payroll taxes that must be paid by an employer providing that employee employment? . . .

. . . That can get into the lengthy and abstruse arguments economists engage in when they debate where the “incidence” of a tax (or subsidy) falls, who actually pays a tax when a transaction between two parties is made subject to that tax whether or not one or the other party is nominally considered responsible for paying it. But, the ultimate answer is complicated and also tied up with complex psychology. Among other things the employee is for various reasons likely to value a job for the sake of the job itself, not just the income. Even when income is taxed progressively at a higher rate at the higher end of the spectrum it is doubtful that an individual would want to be significantly less successful or productive just because he was paying more taxes.

Obama Has Suggested Lower Payroll Taxes

Obama has proposed temporarily cutting payroll taxes. (Remember it was suggested above that to be effective any such cut should be long-term.) One might consider that Obama's proposal has, to date, been under-reported and under-analyzed. For more on this see:

Obama Challenges Congress on Job Plan, by Mark Landler, September 8, 2011

Old Tax Relief Seen as Anchor in Obama Plan, by Jackie Calmes, September 6, 2011

September 14, 2011, How Payroll Tax Cuts Can Create Jobs, by Casey B. Mulligan

News Analysis, Plan’s Focus on Social Security Taxes Reflects Its Modest Ambitions, by Binyamin Applebaum, September 8, 2011

Politifact: Barack Obama on Monday, September 5th, 2011 in a Labor Day speech in Detroit: Barack Obama says payroll tax cut has boosted average family income by $1,000

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has weighed in with a brief article supporting a reduction of payroll taxes although the precision with which he suggests parameters is perhaps somewhat limiting to the imagination: Reich: Eliminate payroll taxes to improve economy, Marketplace, Wednesday, August 25, 2010.

Why Does the Republican Opposition Dislike Reducing These Taxes?

President Obama has tweaked the Republican opposition for being philosophically inconsistent in not supporting lower payroll taxes: After all, aren’t these Republican supposed to be opposed to taxes in general, even routinely signing on to anti-oaths?

There are reasons for the Republican opposition to oppose reduction of the payroll tax, reasons other than that they want to reflexively oppose Obama about everything, and beyond the fact that many Republican's likely have no interest in seeing the economy improve before the upcoming general election. Here are two points. (Does it let the cat out of bag to offer this analysis that others don’t seem to be offering elsewhere?)

One reason for Republicans to oppose payroll tax elimination is that a shift away from dependence on payroll tax revenue could result in a shift that winds up with lower taxes on most low- and middle-income wage earners and higher taxes on the income of the wealthy, replacing regressive payroll taxes with more progressive taxes on investments and capital gains.

The other reason the elite of Republican party leadership likely don’t want such a change in the payroll tax system is that there are many within the party who have their eye on handing a gift to Wall Street by unwinding Social Security and redirecting to Wall Street the contributions that are currently paid into the Social Security Trust Fund. Turning the investment of these vast sums over to Wall Street's brokers would be a much more expensive system than we have now, ridden with risks and a potential for fraud that doesn’t currently exist. That, however, is what some Republicans have their eyes on. If payments currently going into the trust fund became untethered from the payroll tax payments that now come in from individual workers (and were replaced with deposits that clearly came directly from government), Republicans would have a much harder time arguing for and trying to implement their desired switch over to a Wall Street benefit-based system.

Not a Panacea, Only a Start

While reduction or elimination of payroll taxes is the first most obvious tax to eliminate to increase employment, it would not be a panacea. It would not be a panacea because of the structural problems that need to be addressed in the American economy today. But to the extent that some of those problems are tied in with an increasingly skewed distribution of wealth it might begin to address at least some of those structural problems. Historically, skewed distribution of wealth and a lack of regulation of the activities of the wealthy and the financial sector have accompanied significant economic downturns like the Great Depression. We’ll have to leave off here though. The country’s ability to address its problems through versatility, innovation and the generation of new industries when it is faced with the increasing prevalence of lumbering (government-assisted) conglomerates and monopolies is a discussion for another day.

“I Am a Republican When”- - Time Traveling to Look at the Drift of Republican Party in 2004

This post is a time trip back to the 2004 presidential elections. I wrote and distributed the following essay in July of that year to catalog the reasons not even Republicans should have been voting for George W. Bush. (I also prepared and circulated the above pretzel visual at that time.)

In 2004 I was working in state government for a Republican administration.

Am I, or was I a Republican?

I grew up in family with a mixed political heritage, both Republican and Democrat. My father grew up in a home where President Franklin Roosevelt was referred to as "that damn man." By the 60s, time of the civil rights era (and an increasingly vexatious Vietnam) sentiment in the household where I was growing up had definitely swung mostly to the Democratic side. Personally, though there will always be a place in my heart for what I consider traditional Republican values that I deem to include a common sense respect for the workings of the marketplace and a wariness about exactly how much government can achieve when it chooses to intervene.

That meant that the right kind of Republican could gain my support. On the state level I worked with many Republicans I deeply respected. I particularly valued it when they were straighter shooters than some Democrats with whom I have worked.

The problem in 2004, as you will see from what I wrote below, is that the Republican party was drifting away from those traditional ideas. Where is the party now? That would be a good subject for a second essay but I would suggest that the drift away from traditional values begun then, has in many respects continued.

Here is was my evaluative catalog circa 2004:


I AM A REPUBLICAN! I AM A REPUBLICAN WHEN. . .


I think I think a lot like you.

I think I think a lot deeper than other people.

I also thought that invading Iraq might be a good thing if it were done the right way for the right reasons.

I come from a Republican-steeped heritage and I believe in Republican principles.

I vote Republican.

Why then, have I so often voted Democrat?

I AM a Republican when I remember that the Republican party was formed as an anti-slavery party. I am glad that we went on from there and that women now have the vote. I think that there still remains other prejudice and discrimination that needs to be eliminated.

I AM a Republican because I believe in a balanced budget.

I AM a Republican because, like Teddy Roosevelt, I love the environment. I have lived long enough so that each morning when I get up and look at my river and breathe my air I say thank you for the clean air and the clean water acts and I don’t want to go backward. I remember how it was.

I AM a Republican because I believe in Teddy Roosevelt, the Trust-Buster, and, like him, I think that government should be at least big enough to win when it takes on the fight with the conglomerates.

I AM a Republican because I believe in Northeastern values. I believe in progress and education and a vital modern evolving economy.

I AM a Republican because I believe in the power of free enterprise and the force and power of market forces. I AM a Republican when Capitalism defeats Communism and tears down a wall. I AM NOT a Republican when it means government regulation telling beef producers they are forbidden to test for mad cow disease as the market and consumers want.

I AM Republican because I believe in investment and effective use of our capital resources. Right now, in this time of changing technology and speeding progress, the best investment in this country I see is investing in the people of this country. By this I don’t mean tax cuts that strip money from the middle class and hand it to a rich minority that doesn’t need to squander it living in more luxury. I would like to see our capital invested in our own country, in our own people.

I AM a Republican because I believe in a strong economy and a strong Wall Street, but I ruefully and perplexedly recognize the statistics show that for years the economy has consistently been stronger under Democrats. I don’t know why this is, but I think it may have something to do with distribution of resources.

I AM NOT a Republican when the party of Lincoln panders to take in the Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic party. I remember why the Republican party was formed. I don’t like the Bob Jones University and other kinds of prejudice that people try and sell as Republican values.

I AM a Republican when it means hating Saddam Hussein and considering him a villain, just as the Democrats and I guess the rest of the world does. I AM NOT a Republican when Republicans advocate invading another country with no world support. I AM a Republican when we seek, even belatedly, UN and world support to help with what needs to be done in Iraq. I AM NOT a Republican when we oppose the United Nations in effective population control and AIDS-reduction measures.

I AM a Republican because I believe in a strong United States. I AM NOT a Republican when it means fostering and perpetuating an ever greater dependence on foreign oil.

I AM a Republican and believe in the Grand Old Party when it means believing in manners and good conduct, the real kind. I AM NOT a Republican when a bunch of adulterous fogey old men lead a hypocritical and expensive attack on a President’s private life that deserved to remain private.

I believe in sober, reasoned, careful thought. I AM a Republican when it means believing in where Darwin lead us and wanting stem cell research to lead to cures for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and a panoply of other afflictions. I AM NOT a Republican when it means obliterating science and sex information from school text books. I AM NOT a Republican when it means ignoring global warming or not signing the Kyoto Accords. I AM a Republican who believes in the kind of science that Nobel Laureates can believe in.

I AM a Republican who is proud to see my Republican ancestors and Republican family dressed in their Union blues, their World War II Army, Navy, Air Force and Red Cross uniforms. I AM impressed by the soldiers who have been shot at, captured, died and killed. I AM NOT impressed by a service dodger and stay-at-homer who dons a Top Gun inform and declares a war won without recognizing that most of our soldiers have yet to die in a conflict. I have seen the photographs of our Civil War dead. I have seen the photographs of our World War II dead and of D-Day. I can think of no better way to acknowledge our debt to those who are fighting for us than to acknowledge the full measure of their sacrifice and I do not understand why pictures of flag-draped coffins must be banished from sight and mind in place of Fox-News-war-glitz and obliviating happy-talk.

I AM a Republican when it means being faithful to a belief in the separation of Church and State. I AM NOT a Republican when it means the hypocrisy of using “Faith Based” initiatives to discriminatorily, and secretly, funnel government money to a small fraction of Religious Right communities willing to believe only in Jesus. I AM NOT a Republican who, when told by the Italians July 4th week of year 2000, that Air Force One needs to be rerouted because terrorists plan to use a hijacked airplane as a missile to bring down the plane and who then maintains only a resolute, narrow and blind focus on delivering to the Religious Right and launching an attack on other people’s private life styles and draping “nude” statues in the nation’s Capital. I ache when the 9/11 Commission decries a “lack of imagination” as having not prevented the attacks.

I AM a Republican who when told the nation is under a phenomenal attack would have gotten up from reading “My Pet Goat.” I AM a Republican who does not get tied of swatting at flies and protects the nation. I AM NOT a Republican with a failure of imagination.

I AM a Republican who believes that the focus on the Religious Right that should be the focus of the highest quarters of our nation’s government is a focus on the fundamentalist Muslim Religious Right that wants to attack us, so that attacks can be imagined and prevented before they happen.

Separation of church and state is good enough for me to want to export to Iraq and it is good enough for me to want here at home. I guess I care more about this because when it comes to my faith there are things I believe, and I want to believe what I believe without being told what I have to believe.

I am a law and order kind of guy. I like my streets safe and I put stock in law enforcement and the police. I like DNA testing because it means that innocent go free which means we don’t stop pursuit of the guilty. I acknowledge and respect that people in Montana are going to want to carry the guns that can protect them; they have mountain lions there. I rather enjoy venison. I am aghast, however, by legislators who kowtow to the National Rifle Association so that we have laws that prevent us from doing anything about the fact that 100 percent of the guns used in crimes were sold by only 20 percent of Federally licensed firearms and that it has been possible to trace half of all the crime guns to just 1 percent of Federally licensed firearms dealers.

As a law and order guy, I am attracted to the idea of a national identity card, or at least a better way of getting on airplanes, and I think more along these lines and things to deal with terrorism should have been done a long time ago. But to whom do we give the Big Brother power? I don’t see putting it in the hands of John Ashcroft and his Ken Starr minions. I may want security but I am still a Libertarian and I don’t want the government investigating or telling me what to do in my sex life, especially when these people are wont to do such investigations as a way of “getting” someone.

As a law and order guy, I believe in a full complement of judges on the courts. I like my justice swift. But I believe in moderate judges. I don’t need a judge who tells me that the Bible requires women to be subservient to men, that in a marriage ''the woman is to place herself under the authority of the man'' and who scoffs “rape victims become pregnant as often as it snows in Miami.” These people don’t need to be nominated to the bench. They don’t need to be championed.

I understand that there is no clear scientific line to draw to say absolutely when human life begins, so I respect and understand my many fellow Republicans who conclude that life begins when their religion tells them it does, but I personally don’t believe a clump of cells is a human being or that stem cell research is wrong. If it is a question of finding judges to overturn Roe v. Wade, I am not interested. Like quite a few of my fellow Republicans, I believe in a woman’s right to choose. Further, if it is a question of finding judges to nominate who would strain not to follow established precedent, I think that is a way to wind up with judges who are incompetent or worse.

I don’t see why it’s not possible to govern from the center. After all, that’s where I am. It isn’t as if the last election wasn’t actually, in a number of ways, lost to the Democrats. And it can’t exactly be said that everything done to snatch victory from the Democrats was absolutely on the fair and square.

As a Republican I believe in limiting government because of the ability of government to make mistakes. This is why, as much as I hate criminals and love to lock them up and get them out of society, I think differently from a lot who think much like me, and I don't embrace the death penalty. Over and over again DNA testing has shown me how right I am about how wrong government can be. Whoever these people are I want them kept around so that the true story can always be told and the guilty pursued, and found. And as for those who are guilty I want them around long enough to tell me about their accomplices and their other crimes. - - Former Republican Governor Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey, chairman of the 9/11 commission
says about the Trade Center hijackers, “If there are unanswered questions, it is mostly because "the people who were at the heart of the plot are dead."

I thought that invading Iraq might be a good idea. I had Thomas Friedman hopes. To me it seemed that the Middle East has been sort of a Gordian knot. Even if we know now that the sanctions were working mostly the way they were supposed to, it also seemed that they were counterproductive in that they created poverty. I think that Middle East could really use a country that is an Arab success story, a country with freedoms and a working egalitarian economy. I don’t know why we haven’t been thinking about Afghanistan with these possibilities in mind, but that is something else to talk about.

While I thought that invading Iraq could be a good idea, I wasn’t sure I trusted that the way we were getting into the war was right. I wasn’t sure whether I detected a worrisome eagerness, an `I am going to finish my Daddy’s war' attitude.- - And I supported that other war with little reservation.- - I didn’t understand the way we were proposing to do this war, without world support. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t persuade. I was very worried that we were willing to tell the world that we newly believed a thing called a “preemptive war” was a thing the major nations of world could now consider themselves at liberty to launch after ages of that not having been the case.

But then there were the Weapons of Mass Destruction. I really believed that there were Weapons of Mass Destruction. I didn’t believe that there were Weapons of Mass Destruction because I just imagined that there were. I believed that there were Weapons of Mass Destruction because I was told that there were. I wasn’t sure about trusting the president, but I decided to trust the president on this. I had to trust the president. I had only one president to trust. Since 9/11, like it or not, I have had only one president to trust. And this was serious business. And so, I talked to many others who were seriously debating what we should do. I talked to people who had family members who were going to be amongst those sent to Iraq. We shared doubts about the way that this was being done. We thought it could be done better. But, on balance, because of the Weapons of Mass Destruction I counseled them that, even if we were not going to war in the best possible way, it was still the right decision.

Now I have found out how misinformed I was when I talked about Weapons of Mass Destruction. This was for one reason only. I trusted, and I was lied to.

This wasn’t the result of an accidental to-be-further-examined intelligence failure. I know enough about how government works to know how things go. The guy at the top gets what he wants. The guy at the top always gets mostly what he wants. Usually, the guy at the top gets essentially exactly what he wants. If the top guy wants bad ecological science from the Department of the Interior, the Department of the Interior is going to offer up bad ecological science. The top guy gets what he wants. I don’t blame the underlings for what happened at Abu Ghraib. If you take the guy in charge of Guantanamo and put him in charge of the Iraqi prisons, you will get predicable results. You will get Guantanamo prisons in Iraq.

Now what have we got? I listened when, at the press conference releasing the Joint Committee on intelligence failures, the committee said that we are now less safe from terrorism than before we went to war in Iraq. This is because of the way we went into the war. We went into a part of the world where oil is a volatile issue with an oil-company president and Halliburton no-bids-needed cynicism. We went in without world support for trumped-up, made-up reasons we were willing to lie to the world about. An then there is Abu Ghraib. It is nothing more than an invitation for the world to scoff at our professed sincerity and hate us.

As a Republican I am wary of government and its capacity for ill.

I am not enamored of government secrecy. My trust-busting friend Teddy Roosevelt, who wisely battled Standard Oil Co., would be very unhappy to hear about the shrouding in secrecy of all the meetings the oil industry is having with the nation’s administration to establish our country’s energy policy. The oil companies and the Enrons are the last ones who should be setting the nation’s agenda.

Growing up as a Republican, George Orwell was a hero of mine. I still hold his cautions worthy. - When it comes to governance, I do not consider it simple prankishness to give the title of “The Healthy Forests Initiatives” to a handing over of our National Parks to the lumber industry for clear cutting.

It is not a tolerable prank to call weakening the Clean Air Act the “Clear Skies Initiative.”

There are times, perhaps when I am a Democrat. I guess I am a Democrat when it comes to ready availability of health care because the Republicans have no plan. I think I am a Democrat on health care for Republican reasons: because not having portable health care when people want and need to change jobs is a drag on the economy. I guess, as a Republican, I would want the government to be able to shop around for the best deal on pharmaceuticals, but the national Republicans don’t want that. I guess that keeps me a Democrat on the subject of health care.

Yes, I AM a Republican. And I think I am pretty conservative.

I AM NOT a Watergate Republican.

I AM NOT an Iran Contra Republican.

I am absolutely certainly NOT a George W. Bush Republican- Impossible! The man embarrasses me, mightily. The man embarrasses me every single day.