It’s game day today, with the Nevada caucuses for the Democrats and Republicans, and a primary in South Carolina for the Republicans. Frankly, the Republican side of things is where the real fun is. Sorry, Clinton and Obama, but the same old tired bickering over perceived slights to civil rights leaders just doesn’t do it for me. Nothing to get the the blood racing. Over on the other side of the aisle, however, things are nice and dicey. They’ve got a race in the first Republican stronghold state, and four candidates have a legitimate stake. Four! And the fur is flying. Is McCain the Manchurian Candidate, brainwashed by his communist Vietnamese buddies? Is Huckabee a tax & spend liberal with Christian Taliban trappings? Can Romney get a bunch of southerners to vote for a polygamist cultist? Is Fred Thompson actually a credible candidate anywhere? Hoo boy!

Throw in the fact that early Nevada results are currently showing Ron Paul coming in second, ahead of an awful lot of presumably-more-credible contenders… I may have to switch out of my “undeclared” registration just so I can get in on this come February.

Three and a half years ago, a curious thing happened. A former US president passed away and his lying-in-state was televised almost continuously by the 24-hour news networks. Can’t we just leave the old Gipper dead?

Or at least stop totally misrepresenting him? He raised taxes.

Raised.

Taxes.

He raised them on California in 1967, he raised them nationally after his much-lauded 1981 cuts backfired. Particularly he raised payroll taxes, taxes that make up most of the money heading from working people — by which I mean anybody that has a job — put into the federal government, far more than they pay in income taxes or death taxes, the bugaboos of the Republican party, came from his tax increases.

Increases.

In your taxes.

That you pay.

To the government.

The goverment that’s here to help you. The government that the real President Reagan recognized had to act responsibly, as opposed to the phony, flim-flam, made-up hindsight Reagan that so many people like to look back on when they’re crafting duplicitous political rhetoric.

Simply aiming to always cut taxes, always increase military spending, never grant clemency, always cling tightly to the absolutist hard-line of your party faithful does the public a disservice. Things are more complicated than that. You can be frugal without being miserly. You can be strong without being belligerant.

Watching Barack Obama’s speech last night conceding New Hampshire to Hillary Clinton, I couldn’t help but think back to the big immigration rallies last year, with people massing in the streets wearing white tee-shirts, bearing U.S. and Mexican flags chanting “Sí se puede.” That is all.