Local farmers tired of looking at their dusty, cob-webby barn walls can get a nice whitewash job done by calling most any Republican. Whitewashing is what they do.

Nikki Haley's recent inability to say the Civil War was fought to end the moral abomination of slavery is one of the most recent iterations. Southern slaveowners started the whitewash by erecting monuments to Confederate "heroes" and claiming that the war was over states’ rights. The truth was that wealthy slaveholders committed treason against the U.S. and were willing to destroy the Union to defend their ‘property,’ who were making them millions. Ms. Haley's word salad pushed the sanitized version to avoid the wrath of the racists in her party.

Similarly treasonous, the January 6 violent attack on the People's House, and Trump and Co’s scheme to invalidate the votes of thousands by creating fake electors in battleground states, is now portrayed by Republicans as no big deal. After Trump was impeached twice for, essentially, trying to get foreign help to cheat in the presidential election, Republicans like Grassley and Ernst claimed it was all just politics.

House Democrats recently released actual evidence that Trump garnered some $8 million from foreign governments while in office, a blatant violation of the Constitution, but Miller-Meeks and Hinson's Republican caucus, without evidence, accuses the Bidens of being grifters, but shows no inclination to hold Trump accountable. And the spectacle of Jared Kushner, Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, walking away with a $2 billion loan from the Saudis after defending the Crown Prince's killing and dismembering of a journalist, didn't raise a Republican brow. Many Maga adherents are even pushing the lie that the Nazi holocaust didn't really happen.

Got a problem, call a Republican, maybe they can whitewash it away for you.

Tom Jacobson

Riverside