Swamp Rabbit’s parole officer, Victor Cortez, knocked on his door on Election Day, checking to make sure he’s still on the straight and narrow. After they conferred, Victor drove him to the polling place on Christian Street — “Gotta do my civic duty,” Swamp Rabbit said — and I went along for the ride.

“It’s been a long while since I done this,” he said when we got to the voting booths. “I ain’t sure which buttons to push.”

A cloud of dust was stirred up as I patted him on the back. “You’ll figure it out. Just don’t let anyone push the buttons for you.”

Voting this year was easy for me. In the distant past, I sometimes felt guilty for voting the straight Democratic ticket. Surely I’d overlooked some Republican candidate who wasn’t an apologist for bigots and corporate thieves and despoilers of the environment. But then Donald Trump’s era dawned, and it soon became clear that Republican officeholders, all of them, were in lockstep with him.

And they still are. Trump has proudly abused the powers of the presidency. He has usurped the powers of Congress. He was convicted on 34 counts of business fraud. He was convicted of sexual abuse. He said he was a victim of voter fraud, an obvious lie, and he helped incite a riot at the Capitol over this issue on January 6, 2021.

But Republican officeholders don’t care. They keep on goosestepping, either because they believe in Trump’s fascist agenda or because they’re afraid crossing him will end their political careers.

“Think about it,” I told my swampy friend after we voted. “Congressional Republicans tried to keep Trump in office after Biden won in 2020. During the certification process, more than 140 of them voted to overturn the election results. That makes them traitors. They don’t deserve to be in office, and neither do the other Republicans who condone what they did.”

“So what do we do, arrest them for bowing down to the Mango Mussolini? You don’t make no sense, Odd Man.”

“We vote them out of office next time around — if we still have a democracy, that is. We’ve got a long way to go, but this year’s elections might be a good start.”

Footnote: About the Randy Newman song — it was released in the Nixon era, but it could easily be about our current Republican president. I’d like to hear a song about why so many working people vote for pathological liars, knowing they’ll regret it later.