Scott Walkback's Comedy Circus

 The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Scott Walker hasn’t been getting a lot of attention lately, even from the people who once touted him as a serious contender for the GOP nomination.

No one’s really paid a lot of attention to what he has to say, because let’s face it, when the circus (i.e., Donald Trump) is in town, no one wants to go to a boring lecture on policy. His poll numbers have been slipping into the low single digits, so it seems that Walker decided he needed to strap on his own clown shoes, stick on the big red nose, and get some attention from the hoopleheads.

First, he began suggesting to NBC’s Chuck Todd that maybe we don’t just need a fence on the southern border, to keep out the Brown Horde the Republicans have been using as the bogeyman in this election cycle. We may need one along the even longer northern border with Canada, to keep out the terrorists.

Asked, almost facetiously, by Todd about the possibility of a northern wall, Walker suggested with a straight face that that might be a fine idea.

“Some people have asked us about that in New Hampshire,” he said. “They raised some very legitimate concerns. … So that is a legitimate issue for us to look at.”

Doggone right. We really should look at putting up 5,525 miles of concrete, barbed wire and guard towers to keep those syrup-sucking back-bacon-eaters from pouring across our sacred northern borders and forcing single-payer health care and Rush albums down our throats.

Confronted with widespread derision, even from his own party, on the issue, Walker, fresh off his performance a couple of weeks ago in which he took three different positions on birthright citizenship in two days, began the Romneyesque tapdance of denial and evasion that’s caused me to begin referring to him as “Scott Walkback.”

“I never talked about a wall to the north,” he claimed, two days after he’d done exactly that.

Then Walker fell back on the time-honored tactic of, “Let’s find something terrible and horrifying and try to blame it on Barack Obama.” He pointed to the murders of police officers Darren Goforth  of Texas and Charles Joseph Gliniewicz of Illinois, and blamed the “disturbing trend of police officers being murdered on the job” on Obama’s “anti-police rhetoric.”

It should be noted that, as usual, Walker failed to provide any specific statements from the president that are “anti-police” or any evidence whatsoever that these terrible crimes were a result of anything other than plain criminality.

“This isn’t the America I grew up in,” Walker claimed.

Thing is, though, the America Walker grew up in was actually more dangerous for cops than it is now. There have been fewer shooting deaths of police officers during the Obama administration than there were at this point in the George Dubbya Bush administration, just as there were fewer shootings of cops under Dubbya than there were under Clinton.

The trend has been going down, significantly, for years. The Washington Post’s Radley Balko analyzed the numbers and found that “between 1971 and 1975, when Walker would have been between age 4 and 8, an average of 125 police officers were feloniously killed per year. Between 2006 and 2010, the average was 50. In 2013, just 27 officers were feloniously killed. In 2014, it was 51. So far this year, the number of cops killed with firearms is down 16 percent from last year. Two of those officers were killed by other cops.”

So why does it seem like there’s a big jump in people killing police officers when the actual number is trending down? The same reason we have a huge shark scare every summer. The sensation-driven national media can make anything look like an epidemic if they report every single instance of it as part of a “disturbing trend” — where before, the individual stories would have been left to local news.

The national media profit hugely on fear. And, not coincidentally, so do Republican demagogues like Walker. His only problem is that Trump’s doing it bigger, and with a total lack of boundaries or shame.

Maybe Walker can pull himself out of his slide. But if you’re going to try to get the spotlight off Trump, you gotta go big. You’ve got to do something to get the rubes excited. Maybe he could remind us of his track record in Wisconsin by punching a teacher in the face. Wingnuts hate teachers, but they hate Mexicans more. So find a Latino teacher to clobber.

Do that, Governor, and you can get back in there.

THE GOBSHITES SPEAK: As he does nearly every week, Pilot commenter "Lenny Bo" can't wait to tell everyone how uninteresting he finds the column he reads every week:

Walker won't last another couple of months as his poll numbers are dropping fast - he will simply go back to being governor of Wisconsin.

Hey Dusty - how about a similar piece on Hillery - her poll numbers are dropping fast too. Plus she imitates Walker by saying one thing, then doing another (learned this from Bill), she flip-flopped on the emailgate scandal, the list goes on an on. In fact Dusty, if you think about it, there is plenty of material for a dozen pieces on 'ol Hillery.

Well, I've done quite a few pieces on Hillary Clinton, and I've managed to spell her name correctly. This is yet more evidence that wingnuts suffer from that weird kind of brain damage portrayed in the movie "Memento" where they can't form memories, since they're constantly bitching "Why don't you write about [insert obsession here]" when I already have.  It's the same form of brain damage that causes then to demand why President Obama hasn't said anything about violence to law enforcement officers when he has done so, repeatedly. 

A Constitutional Inconvenience?

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Right-wingers love to talk about how much they love the Constitution. But while they may love it, sometimes it seems like they don’t like it very much.

Bring up the protections of the Fourth through Eighth Amendments, and they’ll tell you that “we give too many rights to criminals.” They’re not all that crazy about the 16th Amendment, which establishes the government’s right to levy income taxes.

In fact, the only Amendment they seem to like is the Second, and they treat the first half of that (about the “well-regulated militia”) as if it were an embarrassing relative whom they don’t like to talk about very much.

The latest thing the wingnuts don’t like about the Constitution is the 14th Amendment, which provides that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

That “all persons” provision means that if you’re born here, you’re an American. Period. This Constitutional principle, commonly known as “birthright citizenship,” has become problematic for people who spend most of their waking hours terrified of the tide of Scary Brown People Who’ve Come to Take Our Stuff.

Donald Trump, as the current de facto leader of the Republican Party, brought the issue to the forefront. Following up on his famous “they’re rapists” comment, he laid out his plan for dealing with the estimated 11 million people already here illegally: “They have to go.”

Asked about what happens to those whose children were born here, Trump, a good family man if ever there was one, claimed we’d keep families together, but “they have to go.” When Bill O’Reilly pressed him on the question of deporting actual U.S. citizens, Trump blithely hand-waved away 147 years of 14th Amendment precedent, telling O’Reilly that “very good lawyers” had told him calling them citizens is “not going to hold up in court.”

Yes, folks, you heard right. The 14th Amendment, which clearly states that if you’re born here you’re a citizen won’t survive constitutional scrutiny, according to unidentified “very good lawyers.” In other words, Donald Trump apparently thinks the Constitution itself is unconstitutional.

This is, of course, utter claptrap, and deserving of nothing but scorn and derision. But since the majority of the Republican field are like rudderless sailboats that blow hither and yon in the wind that emanates from Donald Trump’s wherever, they began rushing to assure us that they, too, either didn’t believe in birthright citizenship at all or that they thought it needed to be done away with.

“We need to end birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants,” Gov. Bobby Jindal’s campaign declared on Twitter. Dr. Ben Carson told Breitbart.com that “it doesn’t make any sense to me that people could come in here, have a baby and that baby becomes an American citizen.” Sen. Lindsey Graham took a moment off from gibbering about Islamic terrorists under everyone’s bed to say, “I think it’s a bad practice to give citizenship based on birth.”

Former Sen. Rick Santorum insists that we don’t have to amend the Constitution to do away with birthright citizenship. We “merely have to pass a law.” I guess this is true if by passing a statute we can change the literal meaning of the words “all persons born” to “all white persons born.”

For his part, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker seemed to be vying for the coveted Mitt Romney Ribbon for Campaign Weaselry. Walker told NBC reporter Kasie Hunt in response to a direct question that we should “absolutely” abolish birthright citizenship. Later, however, he said to CNBC he is “not taking a position on it one way or the other.” Still later, he took a third stance with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, answering “no” when asked if we should “repeal or modify” the 14th Amendment—but only after Stephanopoulos had asked him three times.

But remember folks: Only Democrats flip-flop. Republicans “evolve.” Walker’s “evolving” before our eyes like something that came out of an egg in a bad horror film.

I well remember the screaming tantrum the Republicans threw when it was revealed that Barack Obama once called the Constitution as originally written “an imperfect document … that reflects some deep flaws in American culture, the Colonial culture nascent at that time.”

He was, of course, talking about the way the original document embraced slavery as an institution, but from the way Rush Limbaugh and others reacted, you’d have thought the president had proposed using the sacred text to line the White House birdcage before setting it on fire.

Amazing, though, how disposable the beloved Constitution becomes when it comes to getting at the Scary Brown People — and their children. Principles you discard when inconvenient to your prejudices are not principles at all.