Okay, I've been saying this for a long time now: before they even consider running for any public office, republicans - officeholders, candidates, and the rank and file - should apologize to the American people. Apologize, that is, for being consistently wrong about everything, and not just innocently wrong, but maliciously, deceitfully wrong.

Take global climate change: it's real. It's happening. It's the biggest national security challenge, the biggest economic challenge, this country will face in this century. Republicans say it isn't real, and why? Because they've been bribed by the oil companies.

Or take family values. They've been trying to scare you for decades with miscegenation and the scary queers. Meanwhile, their own Presidential candidate dumped his first wife (and kids) for a rich beauty queen who subsequently developed a drug problem, one she maintained by stealing from her charity. Their veep nominee, the catastrophe that is Sarah Palin, cheated on her husband, and her teenage daughter got pregnant out of wedlock, apparently while drunk.

Then, consider the economy. They have been preaching deregulation for decades, and they got everything they wanted. If you read newspapers, you know what's been happening on that score. You also got crappy airline travel, crumbling highways, a horrendous railroad system, hedge fund managers making a billion dollars a year (at a 15% tax rate, one might add, which they are now trying to cut to zero), millions of homes in foreclosure, the biggest income divide between rich and poor since Herbert Hoover, horrible schools, the list just goes on and on.

And meanwhile, above-mentioned Presidential candidate, John McCain, is crowing from the rafters that he's suspending his campaign (which is not actually true), because the same economy that he declared to be fundamentally sound three days ago now requires his personal attention. That personal attention took the form of a White House meeting in which he said nothing for forty minutes. He also was not going to debate Barack Obama tonight in the absence of a bailout plan, a plan which had been negotiated and which his appearance derailed. Despite that inconvenient fact, which of course wasn't a lie, just another broken promise similar to the one he made when he said he'd run a clean campaign, he will debate tonight.

Then, of course, there's family-values poster-child Sarah Palin, who claims that physical proximity to a foreign country confers foreign policy experience. Okay, fine. I can see the Goldman Sachs building from my house, please let me run the place. And you know what? I'm pretty sure I could do better than this. Most people could.

Are there any honest republicans who can face up to the scope of the disaster they've inflicted on all of us? Where's that apology?