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In spite of calls from Republican governors like George Ryan of Illinois to support a moratorium on capital punishment, he rejected all efforts to slow down the number of executions even after it was revealed that there are dozens of people on death row who are innocent.

He has released funds for local communities to hire over a hundred thousand new police officers and supports laws that put people behind bars for life after committing three crimes—even if those crimes were shoplifting or not paying for a pizza.

There are now more people in America without health insurance than when he took office.

He has signed orders prohibiting any form of health care to poor people who are in the United States illegally.

He supports a ban on late-term abortions and promised to sign the first bill to cross his desk that includes an exemption only if the life of the mother is in jeopardy.

He has signed an order prohibiting any U.S. funds going to any country to be used in helping women secure an abortion.

He signed a one-year gag order that prohibits using any federal funds in foreign countries where birth control agencies mention abortion as an option to pregnant women.

He has refused to sign the international Land Mine Ban Treaty already signed by 137 nations—but not by Iraq, Libya, North Korea, or the United States.

He has scuttled the Kyoto Protocol by insisting that “sinks” (e.g., farmlands and forests) be counted toward the U.S. percentage of emissions reductions, thus making a mockery of the whole treaty (which was written primarily to reduce the carbon dioxide pollution from cars and factories).

He has accelerated drilling for gas and oil on federal lands at a pace that matches, and in some areas exceeds, the production level during the Reagan administration.

He has approved the sale of one California oil field in the largest privatization deal in American history, and he opened the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (something even Reagan wasn’t able to do).

And he became the first President since Richard Nixon not to force the auto manufacturers to improve their mileage per galIon—which would have saved millions of barrels of oil each day.

Yes, you’d have to agree, considering all of his above accomplishments, that Bill Clinton was one of the best Republican Presidents we’ve ever had.

There has been much hand-wringing since George W. Bush was given the office, with good people and liberals everywhere freaked out that the son-of-a-Bush would wreak havoc with the environment, turn back the clock on women’s rights, and have us all reciting prayers in schools and at traffic lights. They are right to be concerned.

But Bush is only the uglier and somewhat meaner version of what we already had throughout the nineties—except that back then it came dressed in a charming smile from a guy who played soul tunes on a sax and told us what kind of underwear he (and his interns) wore. We liked that. It felt good, normal. He could sing the Black National Anthem. He partied with Gloria Steinem. He watched my show! I liked the guy!

We were all relieved that the Reagan/Bush years were over, and it was kind of cool that we had a President who had smoked pot and called himself “the first Black President of the United States.” But we had a tendency to turn our heads the other way and block out things like his undermining key provisions of the Kyoto Agreement just weeks before the November 2000 election.

We didn’t want to know about stuff like that; after all, what was our alternative? Baby Bush? Pat Buchanan? Ralph Nader?

Oh, God, no—not Ralph Nader. Why on earth would we want to support someone who agreed with us on all the issues? That’s no fun!

The anger now leveled at Nader seems so personal, so intense, from Baby Boomers who blame him for Gore losing the election (he didn’t lose). I look at these individuals in the their forties and fifties and I wonder why Nader seems so personally threatening to them.

It’s taken a while, but I think I