We confess. It's all true. Everything you say. We trafficked in hate. We
did it in anger. Just as you said, Mr. Kristol, Mr. Krauthammer, Mr.
Brooks: We poisoned the airwaves and befouled the sheets of our nation's
most august publications. We attacked a sitting president, impugned his
integrity, smeared his family, invaded his privacy, tried desperately to
drag him down to our own filthy, rock-bottom, sewer-dwelling level.

There is no parallel between your measured criticism of Bill Clinton and
our vile attacks on George W. Bush. Bill Clinton deserved everything
thrown at him because a corrupt and evil man who gains the White House
by underhanded means should be attacked with every weapon at the
disposal of a free press. And yes, it's true, just as your more
sagacious radio hosts have maintained: Hillary Clinton does owe her
success to the practice of witchcraft. And no, it's not true that
ridiculing Chelsea at the most vulnerable stage in her development was
the media equivalent of child molestation. Chelsea Clinton was fair game
because she is the spawn of Satan. Scurrilous of us to suggest that the
tirelessly moderate and civil proponent of these and so many other
truths, Robert Bartley, now resides in the circle of hell reserved for
hate-mongers and bigots! Mr. Bartley dwells in the bosom of his
Republican creator. We see that now.

George W. Bush cannot be, as we've screamed till we're blue in the face,
the cretinous finger puppet of an incalculably cynical and malevolent
cabal and a ruthless neo-Confederate, bent on creating a plutocratic
ruling class at home and a rapacious corporate imperium abroad. He's one
or the other. We cannot have it both ways. We see that now.

Similarly, we can hardly denigrate Rupert Murdoch and his "gutter press"
while at the same time carping that without him the right would be a
marginalized mob of obscurantist paranoids kept on life support by
retrograde trust-fund nut jobs. Mr. Murdoch is a great populist.
Lowest-common-denominator programming is an honorable tradition in both
the United States and the United Kingdom. Taking such programming to
China, where he is equally solicitous of a proto superpower whose
interests are frequently inimical to ours, does not mean that Mr.
Murdoch is giving aid and comfort to the enemy, or that NewsCorp's money
is somehow "tainted." It's despicable of us to suggest that all those
hardworking journalists -- from Bill O'Reilly to William Kristol -- who
take his supposedly dirty money are likewise tainted! We see that now.

What demon put into our so-called minds the idea that the ghastly
tragedy of that bright morning in September 2001 might have been
prevented because the Bush administration had received warnings for a
month that some sort of attack might be coming? And that the president
and his advisers had ignored that intelligence and then made use of the
tragedy to seize the draconian emergency powers they craved and get the
economy back onto a perpetual-war footing? How could we even entertain
such thoughts? What venom flowed through our hate-infarcted hearts?

We're sorry for our endless ranting about oil being the lifeblood of the
Bush family circle, and The Carlyle Group existing as nothing more than
a gigantic corporate kickback to its members for faithful service while
in office, and the Bush team comprising the selfsame men who supported
Saddam Hussein to the hilt while he was committing most of his genocidal
atrocities and therefore making them his guilty accomplices. These are
vicious, hateful untruths. We see that now.

The First Amendment does not give us the right to screech that young
Americans are dying in Iraq so that George W. Bush can get himself
legitimately elected president. It's a bald-faced lie that his
bald-faced lies about weapons of mass destruction cost them their lives.
Our brave men and women in uniform know when they enlist that there is
always the chance they may have to pay the ultimate sacrifice. Their
motives are never -- as we so squalidly claimed in the wake of the
Jessica Lynch affair -- to get a higher education because the military
is now the sole conduit to it for the two-thirds of Americans who can't
afford it. What a despicably mercenary motive to impute to our heroes!
And in any case, why isn't the re-election of an epochal president a
lofty patriotic aim, worth the sacrifice -- as our great defense
secretary has implied -- of a few lives? Why would this aim fill us with
rage and hate, instead of quiet pride?

We were wrong to call George W. Bush's huge tax cuts legalized looting,
wrong about the replacement of a $5 trillion surplus with a $3 trillion
deficit. No, that is not $8 trillion down the drain in three short
years. We arrived at that ridiculous conclusion by juggling the figures.
If you're as egregiously partisan as we, you can make figures prove
anything. We see that now.

We apologize from the bottom of our hearts for our unfounded suspicions
about the plane crash that killed Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone and his
family. Only a wild-eyed conspiracy nut would link it to the crash had
killed Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan. Nostra culpa! Grief unhinged our
better judgment. Hey, Democrats die in planes around election time.
That's life. We better get used to it.

What drives us to ask -- so shrilly, so annoyingly -- why Ken Lay still
isn't in prison? Are we really certain that he deprived hundreds of
thousands of people of their savings? That he helped hatch a plot to
bring down the Democrats in California by destabilizing that state's
power supply? So what if that's now happened? Has Mr. Lay done anything
that is technically wrong?

Realizing now the awesome power of prayer, we'll stop praying every
moment of every day that Tom DeLay gets snatched up in the rapture. We
realize, too, that the sign in his office -- "This Could Be The Day"
(i.e., Judgment Day) -- does not utterly disqualify Mr. DeLay from
assessing the best long-term interests of the nation. We believe, with
him, that the poor are entirely to blame for their own poverty, and that
if -- sorry, when -- our savior returns, he will indeed own a
concealed-carry permit. We know now that Mr. DeLay is not precisely the
kind of religious lunatic the Founders had in mind when separating
church and state; that he and his co-religionists are in no way brutish,
heathen, hate-driven humbugs whose fundamentalism makes Osama bin Laden
look like the archbishop of Canterbury. We hope and pray that Mr. DeLay
will guide the destiny of America till the trump of doom. Even if it is
next Tuesday.

Looking back on the decade-plus of our boundless ill will and partisan
fury, we've come to understand something absolutely vital about that
glorious year 1989, the year you won the Cold War: The reason the Cold
War had to be won was that it made the world a two-party system. One of
them had to go. It's the same in our great nation. What's the point of
having two (or even one and a half) parties when it leads to nothing but
unending conflict, frustration, stagnation and despair? For America to
bring the message to the world that ours is the best and only way, we
must have unanimity. One party indivisible under God.

Yet ever since 1989, we've been fighting a new Cold War -- in Congress,
in the culture, in the media, in the nation's schools and courts and
bedrooms.

It's time for us to ... surrender. We're tearing down the Berlin Wall of
rage and malice we've erected between you and us. We do this before it
is too late, before you reach the point where you will be forced --
however reluctantly -- to investigate us, confiscate our property,
search our houses, seize our personal records, detain us sine die,
suspend habeas corpus, take reprisals against our loved ones, hold show
trials, send us to re-education camps -- whatever you in your impeccable
judgment deem necessary to preserve the homeland from, well, the likes
of us.

But -- a huge "but," we know -- if in your great hearts you can find the
room to forgive us, if even the meanest of positions can be found for us
in the new dispensation, let us serve you. We'll do anything you want,
no matter how menial: deleting hard drives, wiretapping journalists,
delivering bags of cash to senators, transporting assets to the Caymans,
firing pregnant Mexicans, evicting the disabled, laying bets for
virtuous windbags, beating up young gay men, escorting Muslims to the
border, performing sexual favors for The Heritage Foundation -- whatever
you need we'll do it, and for free.

Some of us even have advanced skills to put at your disposal. We could
help discredit Europe's socialistic health and welfare systems and
nonprofit public utilities so The Carlyle Group can privatize them. We
could produce inspiring movies about the great Americans who are
ushering in the thousand years of prosperity that are just around the
corner. We could create upbeat news stories for the Ministry of Truth
you plan for George W. Bush's second term.

We come to you not just as sinners but as supplicants, begging not just
forgiveness but inclusion. There's a reason God named the right the
right: Because it's right. You have a monopoly on the truth, and you
always have and you always will.

We see that now. We really do.