Confused American (Courtesy the blue, red & white)

The Red, White & Blue. Just mention of the colors kind of puts a patriotic lump in the old throat.

The colors are synonymous with mom, apple pie, Detroit car commercials and the almighty NFL.

Pop flag wavers Lynyrd Skynyrd and Toby Keith have songs with the sequential colors in the title, and they’re the colors political stars of all stripes will wrap themselves in as they seek to convince voters they are the patriots deserving of election.

So just who are they striving to represent? The Netherlands? Luxembourg?

Because flags representing those countries are true red, white and blue.

America most certainly is not.

We’re maybe blue, white and red or the alphabetically proper blue, red & white. If spacial considerations were given we’d likely be the white, red & blue, those being the dominating percentages of the flag colors in descending order.

But if we Americans continue to call ourselves “The Red, White & Blue,” we’re letting the world know we’re a nation of ocular idiots.

Just picture the American flag and let your eye react to it the way it naturally does to words on a page. The eye is conditioned to start at the upper left and move rightward across the top.

With the American flag, the eye sees blue, then white, then red.

I called Vince Vaise, park ranger and chief of interpretation at Fort McHenry, where the American flag inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner,” incidentally a much more accurate and zesty description of the American flag.

He said he knew of no history of how the colors came to be sequenced the way they did.

“Whenever anyone uses bunting, the order is blue, white and red,” he says. “So it goes against that custom. It sounds better, I guess.”

True, but that may only be out of habit. Since children we’ve been indoctrinated to say it in specific sequence -- red, white and blue.

But how did that get started?

I’m going to investigate. I’m going to try and put together a story idea that will inspire some history magazine to assign me to find out the truth.

But more than that, I think it simply needs to be done and, by God, I’ll not rest until I do it.

I’ll do it for mom, country and the good ol’ red, white and blue.

That’s right.

I’m doing it for the Dutch.

Still waiting for an Iraq War apology

The interview could have taken place on any number of cable news programs involving any number of Capital opinion mongers. This one happened to take place Saturday on MSNBC with Pat Buchanan.

I agree with almost nothing the far right Buchanan ever has to say, but I listen to him because he’s thoughtful, witty and unafraid to challenge GOP dogma, as evidenced by his lone wolf opposition to the Iraq War.

The weekend was awash in poignant recollection of the 9/11 attacks that so unified the country as few of us had ever seen.

What happened to that unity, Buchanan was asked.

“I think you started to see it come apart on the night of the 2002 State of the Union address when President Bush started talking about the Axis of Evil and began laying the ground work for war with Iraq,” he said.

Is there anything that can be done today to restore that national unity?

Buchanan immediately began to descend into Beltway babble. He began spouting nonsense about middle grounds, shared interests, blah, blah, blah. A 1988 GOP presidential candidate, he couldn’t come up with a sensible answer.

Or maybe I just tuned out when he didn’t blurt out an answer so obvious it goes unaddressed.

Just apologize.

Somebody needs to say they’re sorry. Say you made a mistake, a real whopper.

I think it would be beneficial to the national unity if even just one of the cheerleaders for the $3 trillion Iraq War would just say, “Oops!”

By now, they’ve all -- Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Rice, Wolfowitz, that whole smarmy gang -- published their blame-shifting books. But no one’s said they were sorry.

This may seem a precious sort of point along side the grim statistics (4,400 U.S. soldiers, 32,000 injured; more than 100,000 Iraqis dead), but my feelings are still hurt over what was said about those of us opposed to the war.

John Ashcroft said anyone who dared to question the Bush administration about the motives for the war was a traitor.

Chicken hawks Cheney and Rush Limbaugh hinted that anyone who opposed the war was what hard men in locker rooms call a “pussy.”

I don’t think I’m a traitorous pussy.

Ten years ago today I was consumed with blood lust. I wanted vengeance. I wanted Osama bin Laden’s head on a stick.

We all felt that way. Hell, the whole world felt that way.

The tragedy of the Bush administration is how it never chose to finish the one job with which the entire country entrusted it.

Imagine how Bush would be viewed today if he’d have kept his eye on the ball, killed bin Laden and cleaned up Afghanistan before dividing the armed forces in another treasure-sapping foreign conflict.

Bush’s speech at Shanksville was marvelous. It made me recall when he stood atop the rubble vowing revenge we all craved.

The only conclusion I can come to as to why they got so far off track was Karl Rove needed a 2004 re-election strategy.

And war in a Iraq was a dandy because a still-scarred nation would rally around our soldiers and woe to anyone who said whoa to politically manufactured war hysteria.

So it would be nice if someone would apologize for calling us stooges for believing Hans Blix, Scott Ritter and the United Nations when they said they needed more time to verify WMD were in Iraq.

I’d like to hear someone apologize to Valerie Plame for ending her career at the CIA because her husband was disputing Cheney’s murky contentions about yellow cake uranium from Niger.

I’d like to see Toby Keith go on the air and say, you know, in the heat of the moment maybe it was a little crass to beat up on the Dixie Chicks for expressing a heartfelt opinion.

I’d like to hear anyone who made fun of anyone like me who said it just might not be the cakewalk they’re saying it’ll be say, man, you were right. It’s been a bit of a bitch.

I really think that would help elevate the national discourse, because I’m ready to forgive you.

But without that apology, it just seems like you all went from cheerleading a historic fiasco and straight into Tea Party birther movements without acknowledging you were dead wrong on the single biggest issue to face this entire generation.

The Iraq War has been a disgraceful mess from the start and it was all your fault.

And if I’m coming on a wee bit too strong at a time when we’re all straining to recover the unity and common ground of post-9/11 America, let me say I’m sorry.

Try it some time. You might feel better.