Eric Margolis: Why I'm a Rogue Republican

I haven't changed my politics and remain firmly in the center. But the Republican Party has lurched so far to the right that the old center looks like the left to many Republicans. My party abandoned me in the year 2000. Barack Obama is dead wrong to propose raising taxes or sending more troops to Afghanistan, an ignoble conflict he mislabels `the good war.' But he certainly is no socialist, as Palin charges. Nationalizing the nation's banks is socialist. Urging world domination neocon-style is National Socialist.

Raising taxes for the wealthy is not socialist, just a Democratic Party shibboleth that has been proven counter-productive time and again. Republicans disgraced the nation by all their lies about Iraq, endorsing torture, assassinations, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, secret prisons, kidnapping, kangaroo courts, spying on US citizens and undermining America's Constitution. Too many cowardly Democrats joined this lynch mob. Such vile behavior made me ashamed to call myself an American.

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McCain and Palin have shamelessly stoked anti-black, anti-Muslim and anti-foreign hatred and fear among them during this campaign. So, to a lesser degree, did Hilary Clinton.

Gen. Colin Powell did the right thing by breaking with John McCain, denouncing racism and Islamophobia, and warning of the party's lurch to the far right. However, I wish he had also come clean regarding all the lies about Iraq he delivered at the UN. The good general still owes us an explanation....