It must be my fault. Surely, somewhere in its interview with President-wannabe Jack Kemp American Heritage must have noted that these pages represented a “Paid Advertisement for the Republican Party.” I just can’t find the tag line. I guess I need glasses.

How else could one explain this highly selective Republican chronology? Wasn’t it the Republicans, after all, who ushered Ulysses S. Grant to power in 1869, along with an administration so bent toward the haves over the have-nots that even Grant’s personal secretary was taking bribes from the “Whiskey Ring” leader Gen. John McDonald, and his Vice President, Schuyler Colfax, had to be removed from the 1872 re-election ticket for his complicity in the Credit Mobilier railroad scandal? Wasn’t it a Republican-dominated Congress that, in the 188Os—at a time when this nation’s overall fiscal strength had stagnated —passed legislation (including ordering up a brand-new navy of armored ships and a nationwide assortment of harbor improvements) designed to gladden the hearts and fill the wallets of only the wealthy minority? And let us not forget the Harding administration, which served the common American by awarding oil leases on public lands to companies that paid the highest bribes to the Secretary of the Interior.