Republican Senator Orrin Hatch recently said publicly that it’s “ridiculous” for terminally ill Republican Senator John McCain to request that the Republican president not attend his funeral.

Perhaps Orrin forgot that the president publicly denigrated McCain and impugned his honor during the president’s disgusting 2016 campaign. As a reminder to Hatch, the president said of McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” (McCain’s fighter jet was shot down over North Vietnam. He helped his fellow prisoners of war endure years of torture under the North Vietnamese at the infamous Hanoi Hilton. Since then, he’s had a distinguished career in Congress for decades, up to and including his dying days. He was the 2012 Republican presidential nominee.)

It’s really time to reconsider a knee-jerk party-line vote for your local GOP rep when they refuse to call out people like this.

We can do better. Much better. Right here in Nebraska we have outstanding, smart, fair-minded moderate candidates like Jane Raybould for Senate, Kara Eastman for Congress, and Bob Krist for Governor (OK he’s older than Ricketts but a far better choice than Dollar-Store Lex Luthor – unless you’re a fan of prison riots). Nearer to home there’s my old friend Nancy Meyer for NRD, friend-of-friends Megan Hunt for NE legislature, and probably someone in your own district who can help restore the separation of powers both in Washington and in our ailing, one-party-rule, would-be Kansas economic disaster.

This is not a partisan appeal. It’s an appeal to decency, to the simple, quaint notions of honesty and ethics in government. Some decent leaders remain in the Republican party (for some reason), like my State Senator John McCollister. But let’s face it – they are the last of the holdouts in a party that is no longer what it was when John McCain was running for president, a party being subsumed into the current president’s populist insurgent cause. It is a lost cause.

That’s all – please think, then vote.

Update: On Thursday morning (5/10/2018), a White House aide named Kelly Sadler joked that Arizona Sen. John McCain’s opposition to CIA nominee Gina Haspel is nothing to worry about because “he’s dying anyway.”