I read with great amusement Paul Tuzzolino's heartfelt plea, "It Is Not About Party" (August 10, 2023). Easy to understand why any Republican up for re-election — even a relatively lowly Wawarsing councilman like Tuzzolino — would want to establish as much distance as possible from the Republican Party right now. After all, the GOP's leading contender for the 2024 nomination faces 91 indictments (and counting) in four state and federal criminal cases (and counting).

Certainly through this November, and just as certainly through November 2024, the nightly news will headline the failed coup of the insurrectionist GOP and the malfeasance of the Trump crime family. The MAGA-cultist faction of the GOP has already begun doxxing the judges and jurors in those cases.

On the national level, the GOP requires loyalty pledges from its presidential candidates, most of whom have already committed themselves to pardoning Trump and others in their theocratic-fascist conspiracy. On the state level, they're stripping books from library shelves, firing teachers for embracing diversity, and doing everything they can to prevent young people, people of color, and others from voting Democratic.

Tuzzolino takes issue with a previous letter writer's assertion that "while many local candidates might not run on a specific agenda, the political party that they are aligned with certainly has one!" Surely he jests. By definition, political parties have agendas. By definition, those who run for election under the banner of any party do so to endorse and further those agendas. By definition, those who vote for representatives from a given party support those party agendas.

It's been that way since ancient Greece. Tuzzolino's objection doesn't even qualify as gaslighting. It's childish nonsense. Tuzzolino claims to be "fiercely independent." However, given his party affiliation, and his chosen party's fealty to the twice-impeached, four-times-indicted convicted rapist, and the variety of fierce independence his Republican cohorts display, we have a right to demand that he put a finer point on his self-congratulatory assertion.

To wit: Is he as fiercely independent as, say, Josh Hawley? As Mitt Romney? As Lauren Boebert? As Chris Christie? As Jim Jordan? As Marjorie Taylor Greene? As Mike Pence? As Ron DeSantis? As Liz Cheney? As Rand Paul? As Tim Scott? As Paul Gosar? As Matt Gaetz?

So many varieties of "fierce independence" — the GOP is just one big tent, innit!

Notably, in the 738 words of his apologia Tuzzolino can't bring himself to say a single word about Donald Trump, the Big Lie of voter fraud, the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the legitimacy of Joe Biden's 2020 election, or the ongoing Republican Party effort to undermine our democracy by challenging election results in state after state. Not to mention the frequent Republican claims that Democrats are communist/socialist globalist Satanist pedophile groomers who drink children's blood.

Not. One. Single. Word.

There is no daylight between Donald Trump and the Republican Party. By Tuzzolino's own choice, there is no daylight between him and the Republican Party, which he's not "fiercely independent" enough to criticize, much less renounce. Whining that it's so unfair that anyone could take his party affiliation into account when deciding how to vote is typically Republican nowadays — panic masquerading as self-righteousness. You can smell the flop sweat.

A. D. Coleman

Marbletown