This grotesque filth shows the moral sewer the GOP now inhabits

Here is an interesting test you can do right now to see if you may be a horrible person: Go online and watch the television commercial for the Vivek Ramaswamy gubernatorial campaign in Ohio that features Donna Arthur, the mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, trashing her daughter as a liar for charging that her stepfather had repeatedly raped her between the ages of 9 and 12.

If you see this ad and think, “Wow. What a terrible thing for that 12-year-old girl to have busted her mother’s husband for repeatedly sexually assaulting her, and inspiring her mother decades later to cut a television ad maligning her character and trying to derail her campaign,” you might have been born without the ability to distinguish between right and wrong.

And in fact, you may well be an atrocious individual yourself.

As we sit little more than a week from the November 3 midterms, this represents something of a tipping point in the political landscape. It isn’t that the Republicans hadn’t already repeatedly proven that they’ll enthusiastically back a monster as the standard bearer of their party in Donald Trump. It also isn’t that they haven’t recurrently shown that it serves their interests to back pedophiles and pedophile enablers over their victims.

But this, ladies and gentlemen, may be the first time that the party has lost the capacity even to distinguish between decency and sociopathy. They are at the very least pretending that a woman whose life was ruined by a serial rapist as a child is the villain, and the mother who sided with her daughter’s abuser is the wronged party.

While it’s true that even some Republicans have briefly located their spine to call for the vile, disgusting ad to be taken down, their collective protest still barely registers as a whimper. Consider that Ohio Governor Mike DeWine denounced the commercial, calling it “deeply troubling,” yet wouldn’t go so far as to abandon his endorsement of Ramaswamy.

In essence, DeWine is saying, “I think you’ve made a modest blunder here, Vivek. But you’re still a good man and you should still have an opportunity to run our state.”

Vivek Ramaswamy is not a good man. He’s an evil, lowlife piece of garbage who has been infected by the same disease as the rest of the Republicans, demonstrating an utter lack of morals, empathy and character and calling it playing hardball. He learned from Trump that there is no bottom, only winning at all costs.

Oh yeah, speaking of Trump, he naturally encouraged Ramaswamy to keep the ad up and running, saying, “It’s a very unusual situation to have a mother hate a daughter that much.” He naturally said nothing about what caused the break between mother and daughter – namely, that this mother backed the rapist over her child, skipping town with him in 1978 to help him avoid incarceration while keeping his name.

Trump then said he didn’t think Ramaswamy “had anything to do with” the ad. That would be the same ad that Ramaswamy is dedicating $4 million to keep up and running and doubled down on when he was called out for his complicity in backing the repulsive commercial.

This would seem to imply that, on some level, Trump knows how despicable the ad is and how inhuman a politician must be for putting it out there. Like Ramaswamy, he supports the “liar” part of the ad without bothering to cite any of the context.

The same goes for JD Vance, a former senator from Ohio who also urged Ramaswamy to keep running the spot. That’s the president and vice president of the United States weighing in that America should stand behind an abusive couple and not their juvenile victim. It’s instead politically expedient, to their mind, to victimize her again nearly half a century later.

Let’s call all of this exactly what it is. These people are re-raping a woman who overcame so much emotional carnage to enjoy a productive and accomplished life. They are defaming her while glorifying the woman who stood by and permitted her daughter’s abuse before abandoning her as a pre-adolescent.

Amy Acton’s traumatic past should be hers alone to cite or bury forever. Vivek Ramaswamy has not a single right to use it as purported campaign fodder. Doing so massively diminishes his alleged integrity and the honor of anyone who comes close to endorsing this horror.

In a normal world and a typical political environment, this sort of behavior would be instantly disqualifying. It would be kryptonite that instantly sank the Ramaswamy campaign and any of his future aspirations. We’d find him forever apologizing for such a profound break from decorum, decency and judgment.

But as we all know, there is nothing ordinary about what’s going on. The moral sewer that Trump swims in has infected everything it touches in his party, permitting grotesque filth to be passed off as the price of ambition. It allows them to stand behind the attack of a woman for charging her stepfather with repeatedly raping her as a child and upending her young life.

To make it perfectly clear, it’s long since been proven that Acton made up none of it. She is not a “liar.” She is instead a woman of uncommon strength and courage. If she weren’t, we’d be talking about someone whose future was stolen from her, not an esteemed candidate for governor.

It used to be that the one thing uniting everyone was a revulsion of child sexual abuse. However, in the era of Trump and Epstein, it’s devolved into a political issue. In the modern-day Republican Party, pedophilia itself is less an inexcusable crime than a test of party loyalty.

On the eve of the midterms, I despair for a country where shame itself has died – and one party has decided that power is all that matters.

(Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.)