My butt is responsible fora huge number of jobs in this country. There's a vibrant industry dedicated to paper products aimed squarely at it, or rather an unending stream of squares, where fierce competition drives innovation to ever greater heights. Or depths. Fortunes are made or lost in the battle for my butt, from Scott to the Koch Brothers (always feel a little odd about having them in by butt), always trying to gain the edge in terms of softness, lack of "pills," cushioning (embedded air), companies plying their trade for access to, my butt.

Then there are all the adjacent industries. It starts with logging for the raw materials - wood. Truckers to move logs, fuel to power the trucks, processing, chemicals, big hardware for rollers, more trucks to transport it. More fuel. Grocery stores, convenience stores for when it's 2AM and your butt needs some serious attention. Shelves in the stores.



You do not want my bunghole to become angry!

Now, let's look at the back end. Miles of pipes bring water into toilets, then many more miles take the, erm, product to plants where it's processed, degunked, more chemicals but also filters. Creating better systems to filter the waste before releasing it back "into the wild" is an industry with all the innovation of any other industry. Back end development!

Then there's the marketing, part of the aforementioned competition. So much work is dedicated to making my butt feel more cared after - I hesitate to say pampered in this case - that it's an industry all by itself, all aimed at capturing the market share of my butt.Many industries are indirectly related, such as billboards, TV, radio, web ads. And of course, any time there's a butt involved, baby pictures will be drawn in as if to a black hole, or a brown one, necessitating photographers, processing, airbrushing, and a dozen other fields to prepare the perfect images.

And it all comes down to my butt.

Now, look at the rich person. He or she also has a butt which supports all the same, wide range, or industries. So their butts are just as important as mine, but really, do their butts really need a tax break?

The other day I saw a post titled "Republicans Are Assholes," and I thought about it for a while, finally coming to the conclusion that I had to politely disagree. Assholes are really useful things. They provide a useful, in fact critical service of eliminating, ahem, material that would otherwise have an adverse effect on the functioning of our biological system. Waste elimination is a part of the Republican platform, so it would be more appropriate to say Republicans aspire to be assholes.

In 2010, Republicans ran campaigns on creating jobs. Curiously they never gave any information on what they would do to create jobs and after they took the house, there was a slew of abortion-related bills and other things that had no real effect on anything, such as affirming the national motto to be "In God We Trust." Anything labeled as a "jobs bill" was thinly disguised cruel ideology. Some of it wasn't even disguised, such as drug testing unemployed. Cutting government services created more unemployed, but freed money up for more tax breaks for the "job creators," which are just Republican-friendly people or businesses.

Deficit reduction became a major cause that Republicans were suddenly concerned with after having run up the deficit the previous 8 years. Partially this was a way to divert attention from the lack of actual jobs bills but it was really an excuse to cut programs that actually helped the country and poorer people in particular. This in fact hurt the economy, which was the goal since incumbent presidents are less likely to be reelected if the economy is bad. Republicans aren't stupid: they know that deficit-reduction hurts recessed economies and that "trickle-down" supply-side economics doesn't work, but helping the country isn't their goal: getting money to people who will donate to Republicans is their goal.

Certain types of tapeworms have more than 50% of their organs, by volume, dedicated to reproduction and rely on host organisms to do most of the work of getting and digesting food. This is what the Republican party has become: an organization whose efforts are mostly geared toward perpetuating the organization, not to actually producing anything useful. If anything, their "reproductive system" is a bigger percentage of the organism than in a tapeworm. They use taxpayer money to support wars that feed contractors which then give back to the party, continually attempt to "privatize" government-run programs to Republican-friendly businesses, and generally hijack anything they can to support their own existence. The American people, like any organism besieged by parasites, have to work harder and longer to support the corrupt organization leeching their cut.

So really, Republicans say a lot of things. Romney is a great example of someone who will change his positions often just to get himself elected but he is by no means the only one. And even as the things Republicans support changes, the goal is always the same, ultimately to support themselves. "Eliminating waste" is only a means to divert money to those who eventually feed the party so really, Republicans only say they aspire to be asshole, when they're quite content to be the turd.