Dear Senator Dole: I must respectfully decline your invitation
NO WONDER we never found weapons of mass destruction. The Republicans cannot even find Republicans!
I know this because I received a letter from Senator Elizabeth Dole, the National Republican Senatorial Committee chairwoman, to join the Republican Senatorial Inner Circle. Her letter praises me for my ''remarkable support of President Bush's agenda."
Along with a certificate for framing, the letter said I was in the ''top echelon" of only 100 people from Massachusetts who were extended this invitation on the circle's 25th anniversary. It said, ''Mr. Jackson, please know there are many strong Republicans in Massachusetts, but we cannot recognize them all. . . . President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Senate majority leader Frist, and the Republican members of the Senate are counting on you to answer this call and accept this well-deserved invitation."
If someone at Republican headquarters twitched their fingers on a keyboard, they would have seen how ill-deserved this invitation was. If they had Googled me, they would have seen that the second reference to Derrick Z. Jackson is my 2003 column that said that despite the capture of Saddam Hussein, ''The invasion was still a lie." On the first results page there is also the column about Bush's speech at racist Bob Jones University and the headline, ''A disturbing lesson about the real George W." On the first page of references for Derrick Jackson sans the ''Z," Google has my 2004 column titled, ''Reagan's heart of darkness."
The Republicans talk about a big-tent party, but this is ridiculous. Even if this letter had come from a Democratic senatorial inner circle, it would have been laughable. I am a registered Democrat who often criticizes the party's wishy-washy capitulations. I wrote that President Clinton should have resigned over his lying and loss of moral authority in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
But for the Republicans to offer me a $2,000 membership and have my name ''permanently etched on the Founders Wall in the Honors Courtyard of the Ronald Reagan Republican Center" after a column on Reagan's heart of darkness is a dazzling plummet to the depths of media literacy. We have long known that Bush himself does not read newspapers. But his lack of curiosity appears to have become an epidemic.
We have the Keystone Kops sale of six ports to a Dubai-owned company that neither Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, nor Treasury Secretary John Snow knew about. The mounting evidence that the government ignored the early accounts of Hurricane Katrina breaching the levees of New Orleans made Republican congressman Christopher Shays say the government had ''failed all levels in planning for and responding to Hurricane Katrina. The White House was clearly in a fog, Secretary Chertoff [the head of Homeland Security] was totally detached and Michael Brown [former head of FEMA] was negligent."
On the clueless negligence on my invite, I called the Inner Circle several times, to no avail, to see how it had happened. Over the years, the Inner Circle invited several decisively un-Republican newspaper columnists, Democratic elected officials, Democratic National Committee cochairman Steven Grossman, and rapper Eazy-E.
Along with the certificate and Dole's letter was a request from majority leader Bill Frist to fill out a survey on the party's priorities. Frist's letter said, ''With careful consideration of those who are most active in their support of President Bush and the Republican Party, you have been selected to represent your district. . . . Many media pundits and Democratic strategists believe that for Senate Democrats to regain the majority this November they must continue their unprecedented obstruction to rally their most LIBERAL supporters. . . . That is why I need you to complete and RETURN THE SURVEY DOCUMENT -- AT ONCE."
Journalism ethics prevent me from completing Frist's questionnaire and giving answers the opposite of what he wants to hear -- as much as I would like to rearrange the deck chairs on his tax-cutting Titanic. But there is still hope for others to answer the survey.
Dole's letter says, ''I need to make sure this crucial echelon is operating at top strength. . . . If you cannot participate, please let me know, so that I may extend this honor to those currently on the reserve list."
Dear Senator Dole, I hereby announce that I cannot participate. If the careful consideration of your Republican operatives put me on your A team, that gives me great hope the reserves can still save this country!
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com. 
