They’re all like this aren’t they?

A headline that's shocking only for the fact that a wealthy Republican donor was jailed for any crime at all:

Top Republican Donor Killed in Prison After Serving Nearly Two Decades for Sexually Assaulting Two Children

All I can think is well, that’s one less predator on the planet.

I just checked the article’s date — he was convicted and jailed in 2001, 25 years ago, and offed in 2021. Dunno why it hit my feed last night. Maybe Tyche (Greek goddess of chance) made a late visit to my hard drive? 

At this point, in the year of our cat 2026, do Republicans even get their wrists slapped for raping children? Doesn’t seem so.

Reading more of the story, Mark A. Grethen was convicted for raping two kids but there were a lot more accusations against him. Dude was a stone predator.

At trial he did what might reasonably be expected; he accepted a plea bargain in which twenty of the twenty-six counts on which he was indicted would be dismissed in return for his plea to six individual charges. (source) 

Mark was a litigious motherfucker in the slammer. It seems most of the cases he brought forward were about trashing his former lawyers as well as the system which enabled him to bring suits while a prisoner. It’s a bit confusing. Did Mark have real, honest complaints or was he just an annoying, lawsuit-happy asshole? I mean, he copped to all his heinous crimes. What did he think? That he could simply admit to raping multiple children, then go back to his golf game, cigars and bourbon down at the country club, and show up for his Monday morning business meetings as though his crimes were no more than a traffic ticket?

Leads me to believe that he would have been the same pedophile coming out of the joint as he was going in. He seemed to have no understanding of consequences.

Citing its own archives, the Virginian-Pilot noted that Grethen was "briefly named Republican of the Year in 2002 by the National Republican Congressional Committee — an arm of the Republican National Committee." (source) 

The award was taken back after the Committee was made aware that old Mark was a serial child raper. I guess in the pre-Prez Pedo days the GOP actually cared if their donors raped children. I take that back. Perhaps they just couldn’t get past the fact that he’d been caught and convicted and that would lead to bad press. Can't have that – oh my, no! Still, how incredibly half-assed of the Republican National Committee. The pedo had already been in jail for a year for raping children and they made him Republican of the Year?!!! Do these people not do background checks or do they just not think? I’m going with the not thinking bit. 

I suppose this is the best we can expect from people who support criminally dimwitted morons like Trump, Tommy Tuberville, Lauren Boebert, Ken Paxton, Moses Mike Johnson, etc.

We now know that Republicans will boldly, wholeheartedly support a presidential candidate who’s been convicted of raping of an adult. Stands to reason they would have voted for Trump if they’d known he’d been convicted of raping a child, which he allegedly has done. Republican Senators and Representatives are still marching in lockstep behind him despite all that’s dribbled out from the heavily redacted Epstein files. They continue to support and bow down to him despite his blatant criming and how obscenely clear it is that he’s lost what little grip he may have once had on sanity.

We’ll never know if Mark Grethen would have been a rapist post-prison or not (unless one of you lovelies can walk into an alternate dimension where he’s alive and now out of Lawrenceville). Bret Cook is the hero who took Mark down and out.