The Republican party is not your friend. Unless, of course, you are very, very rich and mostly a white male. An older one. And maybe a short one, too.

We know this because it is the Republicans in Congress who defeated a proposal to require the airlines to stop reducing the size of their little sub-human seats in coach sections. Yes, hard to believe anyone could oppose this humane idea, but the Republicans did. And why? Because the airline industry lobbyists paid them off. We can call it “campaign contributions,” but it’s a payoff. The older rich white men who run the airlines paying the older white men who do their bidding in Congress. Thanks, buddy.

This might be news if it weren’t for the fact that it isn’t news. This is the Republican trope. This is what the party of Lincoln has come to: a group of wealthy, older white men looking out for themselves and their friends who also happen to be … well, you get it.

This is party that has tried repeatedly to kill Obamacare, depriving millions of health insurance coverage with no realistic plan to replace it. Shame on those poor people for getting sick. Or for having an illness that prohibits them from coverage otherwise.

This is a party that increasingly seeks to limit voter participation in elections, to oppose living wages for minimum wage workers, to enhance discrimination against minorities (gays, for instance, and mostly people who aren’t rich, white older men) and to do everything they can to take away women’s control over their own bodies.

They know nothing of climate change (because they aren’t scientists, you know), and they see the solutions to foreign problems resting in the idea of sending more young men and women off to fight and die. Some of them are, I confess, well-meaning; heck, some are even intelligent and reasonable older white men.

But here’s the problem: if they fall into that minority category — intelligent and reasonable, I mean — they are in fact a tiny minority in the GOP, and they lack the numbers to influence the radical right wing members of their party. So, voting for them doesn’t alter anything. The only possible solution — hope, really — is to defeat as many of the Republicans as possible. When the Democrats can claim a majority in the Congress, we are more likely to have at least a few moments of sanity in governance.

Think about it as the fall elections draw closer. Think about it carefully. Please.