I'm always surprised when people come up with what they think are amazing revelations that actually are anything but.

My friend Mick -- probably one of the few right-wingers in the world who is a really good person -- made a comment on Facebook in response to something I had written in which he said I had shown my true colors as a leftist.

My comment, in response to something on Huffington Post about the government shutdown negotiations, was this:

<em>"I used to disagree with Republicans, but with a  few exceptions, I didn't think they were bad people. Now it seems like  so many of them are real scumbags."</em>

My dear friend said that my "bias and prejudice just flows."

Uh, duh.

<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/bagley.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-1004" title="bagley" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/bagley-300x205.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="205" /></a>It isn't as if I have been a straight-ticket voter all my life. I have actually voted for Republicans at one time or another for both houses of Congress and twice for governor of California. I even voted in the Republican presidential primary in 2000, although that was as much a vote against George W. Bush as it was a vote for John McCain.

But those were the days when Republicans stood for more than just cutting government, privatizing everything and keeping taxes as low as possible for the mega-wealthy.

I mean, face it. There are now Republicans in Congress -- in control of one of the two houses -- who basically want to eliminate Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Am I a leftist?

I'm a proud leftist in some areas. I think we need single-payer, government-run health care in this country. I think we should cut our military budget by at least a third and maybe as much as half. I think the mega-wealthy ought to actually pay taxes, and indeed that they have the responsibility to pay for the tremendous benefits they have received from being Americans.

<em>But isn't it unfair to call Republicans "scumbags?" Isn't that a little rough?</em>

Well, let's start with the assumption that anyone who encourages the crazies to believe things that they know aren't true is a scumbag. Does anyone with a fighting chance at both sanity and a three-digit IQ really think that President Obama wasn't born in the United States? Yet there are plenty of people who ought to know better who are encouraging the tinfoil-hat set to keep after the president about his supposed birth in Kenya.

We used to live in a country where as long as you were willing to work hard, you could make a decent living and have a chance to give your kids a better life than you had. But ever since the advent of multinational corporations and the millions of lost jobs that they outsourced, now we live in a country where for many people the only jobs available involve paper hats and name tags. As George Carlin put it, the reason they call it the American Dream these days is that you have to be asleep to believe it.

Do I think the government ought to do something about all that?

You bet I do. We can start by telling companies that if they want the benefits of being American companies, they need to keep their jobs in America and pay taxes in America.

Am I a leftist? Not in everything. I depart from the folks on the left in some of the so-called "life" issues. I'm against capital punishment, but I'm also against euthanasia, assisted suicide and abortion. Throw in anti-war, and it pretty much adds up to saying that God is the only one allowed to take lives.

But on most of the other stuff, I'm as far to the left as my good friend is to the right.

And damned proud of it.