When I was young, you generally didn’t know a person’s political party. People were able to talk about issues from the vantage of how to pool our talents to solve problems. I had no idea if my friends were Democrats or Republicans. It didn’t really matter to me. It didn’t really matter to most people.

Even though it was in the pre-Facebook days of analog friends you actually interacted with, it was not common to unfriend someone because of what political party they belonged to. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans cast their opponents as being the scourge of the earth, just two parties with different approaches to common issues.

Times have changed dramatically. Now it seems that if you run into someone who is an asshole, it’s pretty much certain they’re a Republican.

Think about it:

Donald Trump is an asshole.

Mitch McConnell is an asshole.

Matt Gaetz is an asshole.

Lindsey Graham is an asshole.

Ron Johnson is an asshole.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is an asshole.

Sean Hannity is an asshole.

Ted Cruz is an asshole.

Lauren Boebert is an asshole.

Ron DeSantis is an asshole.

Tucker Carlson is an asshole.

Jim Jordan is an asshole

Kevin McCarthy is an asshole.

What else do they all have in common? They’re all Republicans.

The Greek word “proktos”(as in proctology) translates to anus or asshole. You could say that the GOP no longer stands for Grand Old Party. Now it seems to stand for “Gathering of Proktos”. In other words, a Gathering of Assholes.

Things had actually started to change in the generation before mine. Richard Nixon was the first truly untrustworthy President. His lies and criminal activity were a stain on the Republican party.

One would hope the party would have pushed forward in a new direction – distancing themselves from Nixon’s underhanded politics and pointing the ship back towards Lincoln-era priorities of putting the people first. But they didn’t.

Instead, the Republicans rode Ronald Reagan’s movie star charisma into the White House and promptly destroyed the American way of life by cutting corporate taxes from 70% to 35%. Reagan’s trickle-down economics philosophy was that if you gave money to big business, it would be shared with employees down the food chain. It failed miserably. In 1985 under Reagan, for the first time in history we became a debtor nation.

In terms of outright corruption, Reagan picked up where Nixon had left off, with such illegal engagements as the Iran/Contra affair. He was protected by his party, letting Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North take the fall for the scandal. This was a sign of what was to come for Republicans – lying to the people and protecting the leaders of the party no matter how corrupt they were.

However, nothing prepared us for Trump and Fox News. The level of propaganda has been unfathomable. Trump told over 30,000 lies during his time in the White House. He averaged over 20 lies a day. And Fox News served as his personal propaganda machine, even going so far as to cater to Trump’s demand that they perpetuate his totally baseless lies about election fraud. He lost the 2020 Presidential election by over 8 million votes. It’s been proven over and over.

What is the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Counting the ballots over and over is never going to change the fact that Joe Biden easily won the 2020 election.  

With new information coming out daily, we now know that we came dangerously close to Trump shredding the Constitution to overturn the election and stay in office. That, in turn, led to his urging his followers to descend on the Capitol on January 6 and use violence to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s win.

Now the crazy train is truly barreling down the tracks. Republicans who had to hide for their lives from Trump’s army on January 6, are now calling those domestic terrorists heroes. Who do they blame instead? Antifa, of course!

Antifa stands for antifascist. It is a belief that fascists are bad. That’s it. It’s a belief that people like Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Vladimir Putin are bad. There is no organization called Antifa, unless you count the US Army in World War II. The truth is, Antifa is just a boogieman the Republicans like to scare their sheep with. It doesn’t exist. It’s the equivalent of a child blaming the missing cookies on their imaginary friend.

Now, while it is true that all assholes are Republicans, I’m not saying all Republicans are assholes. Over 81-million people voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Many of those votes came from Republicans who don’t want to see their country go down Trump’s path of a dictatorship. Those Republicans should be applauded for putting country before party – as I believe it should be.

We all have choices in life. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be a Republican. I’m just saying you shouldn’t be an asshole.

Peace. Love. Trust.

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