Joe Walsh: Racism Goldilocks Gets All The Media Go-Go Juice He Wants

As you know, the longest, slowest and most reliable road to going broke and never getting invited to all the cool parties is to have been right about the Right all along.

Conversely, the shortest, laziest and most reliable path to media fame and fortune is to have been a Republican dickbag your entire adult life -- to have devoted yourself unremittingly to the creation of the GOP Monster Machine.  Then, as a life-long Republican dickbag, when the prefect Apex Republican Predator finally rolled off your assembly line, you had a couple of choices: either reap the rewards of joining  Trump's Pandemonium Carnival --

-- or reap the rewards from being a suddenly "woke" Republican who is shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that your Republican party is full of Republicans.

Didn't matter which path you took: if you're a Republican, there would be a pot of gold at the end of any path you choose.

Which brings us to Deadbeat Joe Walsh:  the racist, crackpot, one-term Teabagger congressman turned fringe wingnut radio host from the suburbs of Chicago.

A couple of weeks ago, if you were a normal citizen living a normal life, there would have been no reason you would've known anything about Deadbeat Joe.  He's an odious and undistinguished crank and if you were aware of him at all it was probably as once of dozens of interchangeable, perpetually-indignant Republican meatbags who eke out a living at the wingnut welfare trough Shouting About The Gummint and Liberals and Stuff.

Over in the Better Universe, Deadbeat Joe Walsh announcing that he was gonna take a run at the White House would be treated with the same degree of unconcealed amusement by the Fourth Estate as the late Lar Daly's perennial campaigns for mayor and president.  Or Lyndon LaRouche.  Or Pat Paulson.

After all, one of the glories of the American political circus has always been its way-way off-the-Midway freaks and comedy acts, and reporters knew to treat them as such.

But we don't live in the Better Universe.  In this universe, President Stupid is in the White House and the Party of Bigots and Imbeciles loves him, which is why Deadbeat Joe has pitched his stunt-campaign as the guy who will cripple Trump by running to his right.

Deadbeat Joe -- who is a howling bigot in his own right -- is running as the GOP's Racism Goldilocks on the theory that Donald Trump may be too flamboyantly racist for some GOP base voters, while  Bill Weld is not racist enough. But Deadbeat Joe is just the right amount of racist to pull some tiny fraction of a percent of GOP primary voters away from Trump, while at the same time endorsing every monstrous policy which has made the GOP an existential threat to our democracy.

Of course, anyone deranged enough to vote for Deadbeat Joe in a GOP primary will go fleeing back to Donald Trump in the general election because OMFG!Socialism! so in what way is Deadbeat Joe's fringe stunt candidacy any different from any other fringe stunt candidate?

Well, for one thing, Walsh was immediately booked on CNN

And then he was booked on MSNBC.  A couple of times.

He was given a seat at the table on ABC's Sunday Morning Gasbag Thing

And my one-time, home-town paper, the venerable Chicago Tribune, devoted a full-page to this ambulatory stool sample:

Former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh, once a Trump supporter, to challenge him in Republican primary

Followed by another half-page in the Tribune.

There was the half-page story in my local paper.

The New York Times invited him to do his own guest column:

Joe Walsh: Trump Needs a Primary Challenge
The case for a contender from the right.

The Times then dispatched Maggie Haberman to seek out the infallible electoral genius of Bloody Bill Kristol on the matter:

A Former Congressman and Tea Party Republican Considers a Challenge to Trump

...
The New York Times reported last week that Walsh was getting some high-profile encouragement from a leader of the “Never Trump” Republican movement, Bill Kristol:
...
Mr. Kristol has been a “Never Trump” Republican since Mr. Trump was elected in 2016 and has been working hard over the past year to recruit someone to run against him.

Mr. Kristol said Mr. Walsh’s comfort with the in-your-face format of conservative talk radio makes him a potentially more effective combatant against Mr. Trump than someone like William Weld, the genteel former governor of Massachusetts, whose own primary challenge to the president has gained little traction.

“He has a different appeal than Bill Weld,” Mr. Kristol said. “The fact that he was a Tea Party congressman who voted for Trump in 2016 gives him an ability to speak to Republican primary voters that ‘Never Trumpers’ like me don’t have.”

After which Peter Wehner used his real estate in The New York Times to Speak Boldly Out Against Walsh:

The Joe Walsh Challenge 

Would I speak out against the former Tea Party congressman, now that he was running against Trump? Here goes.

All of which prompts a couple of observations.

First, the question of why The New York Times has given an op-ed column to an unreconstructed wingnut goof like Peter Wehner in the first place (from The Daily Banter) --

The highbrow greed, bigotry, and misinformation pimped by Wehner's billionaire funded propaganda outfit filters down through Fox News, AM Hate Radio and right wing hate sites into the increasingly paranoid, ignorant and terrified minds of the Republican base. They, in turn, elect ever more extreme politicians to "protect" them with tax cuts for billionaires and laws against Muslims and Transgender people.

Wehner helped create a base of angry, scared, stupid people that cling to their bibles and literally think Planned Parenthood sells baby parts for money. When he complains that, "a solid majority of Republicans and self-described evangelicals are firmly aboard the Trump train, which is doing its utmost to give a seat of privilege to Mr. Moore", he's forgetting to mention that he's one of the conductors that punched their tickets and yelled "All aboard!"

To be absolutely clear, no political party or religious movement openly embraces white nationalism and child molestation in the span of two years without something having already been seriously wrong. The moral compass of the right was already directionless long before they threw it in a wood chipper and then set the wood chipper on fire.

-- will remain on my very large pile of New York Times-related "Maybe in Heaven I'll get the straight dope" questions alongside "Why the hell does Bari Weiss have a job at the NYT?" and "Why the hell does Ross Douthat have a job at the NYT?" and "Why the hell does Bretbug Stephens have a job at the NYT?" and "Why the hell does David Brooks have a job at the NYT?".

Second, did I mention that Deadbeat Joe Walsh is a fucking stunt-candidate.  He has no hope of winning anything.  He is in this to cadge a piece of that sweet Never Trump scam, because the media has rigged the game so that it's all upside for Never Trumpers.  If Trump crashes and burns in 2020, Never Trumpers will leave their MSNBC/Crooked Media crash-pad, sweep in and take over the remnants of the GOP as the "We Told You So" wing.  Then watch as they get behind a Cotton/Rubio 2024 ticket ASAP while at the same time shoving Liberals like you and me out of the way to take credit for stopping Trump.  And should Trump eke out a Moscow Mitch-assisted win 2020, the Never Trumpers will continue to feast from the bottomless "If Only The Stupid Democrats Had Listened To Us!" media trough.

So while my memory may be spotty in places, I don't remember the mainstream media climbing all over itself to grab eyeballs and rubberneckers by pretending to debate the pros and cons of any other stunt candidate.  Or maybe I just missed all the weighty think pieces on the relative merits of Peter Diamondstone and "Temperance" Earl Dodge.

Maybe I was abed with a raging ague and slept through ABC News giving twenty minutes of prime Sunday morning network airtime over to Bear Betzler or Robert "Snake" Plissken.

Perhaps I wanted to be alone with my thoughts and a bottle of Lagavulin the day Bloody Bill Kristol was making the rounds on cable teevee extolling the virtues of Richard P. Astley and David Brooks published his bold "The Vermin Supreme Challenge" column.

But I think not.

Behold, a Tip Jar!