at the risk of sounding like an apologist

Leslie and I were sitting on the patio of an Austin coffee-spot at a communal table near a couple in their mid-thirties. They were good liberal Democrats. They leaned over their early morning coffee and caught up with each other's lives.

"So the girl you were dating. She dumped you?" The woman asked.

"It was aaah . . . mutual. I just couldn't get over her Republicanism."

"I thought your dad was a Republican?"

"Well, yes. But he said he thought Bush, on a scale of one to ten, was a two. Nixon was a five."

"Well," the woman said, "at least he's being honest with himself."

There was a smugness in her voice that gave me a queasy feeling. It was the tone that bad winners have when they're gloating.

Our country has been at the mercy of a lot of misguided Republican Group-Think. Bush and the Neo-Cons have been the advocates of the rich, of the torturers, of the bullies. They trumped clear public discourse, reason and logic with ideological arrogance, greed and incompetence. But the Bush administration represents an extreme that has led all of us astray.

The failures of the past eight years do not justify our own brand of Democratic Party Group-Think. We have to be careful not to slip into believing we have the one "true" way and those who don't follow it are deceiving themselves.

Here is our situation: We're all screwed. The economy is worse than it has been in eighty years. We're losing two expensive wars. The environment is degrading around us. There are no quick fixes for any of the problems that confront us.

It is going to be tempting to settle some old scores now that we, the Democrats, are in charge. But we don't have time to waste on petty politics. The truth is that we'll have to entertain every good idea regardless of its origin -- and the Republicans are going to have a few of them -- to pull out of the mess we're in. All of us are going to have to work in concert to put things back in order.