During a recent public hearing, a leader of the La Crosse County Republican Party made references to the Green Party that fell somewhere between fighting words and slander.

This is something we can expect to see a lot of during the upcoming debate on the Bring the Troops Home referendum: with no rational arguments to support their case, they will resort to irrational ones. Expect a lot of lies, distortions, distractions, insults and personal attacks.

The Green Party is the only party to have opposed this Iraq debacle from the very beginning. We can see in the rear-view mirror that the Greens were right all along, and that the Republicans were lying.

The Green Party is not only untainted by the corporate corruption of the two major parties, but it is the only party that speaks for the needs of the rest of us instead of the corporate agenda of the super-rich.

While the Republican Party distracts us with abortion, gay marriage, and religion; their office-holders are stealing the food off our tables on behalf of their corporate sponsors. Mussolini once defined fascism as the merging of government and corporate interests.

Consider the “values” of today’s Republican Party: corruption, torture, secret prisons, spying on Americans, harassment of dissidents, exploitation and abandonment of the non-rich, and a long litany of other outrages.

They may like to call themselves the party of Lincoln, but Lincoln would reject these people. Today’s Republican Party is more like the party of Mussolini and Stalin.