There is a lot that I, a petty bitch who loves a good storyline, have very much enjoyed this election season. Relatively broke progressive candidates trouncing centrists flush with AIPAC cash? Directly into my veins, please and thank you. The way the “Will you condemn Hasan Piker?” nonsense has been failing — largely because the people who are supposed to be freaked out by him don’t know who he is and also really don’t want to have to watch hours of his or anyone’s livestream in order to find out? Love it.
But one under-appreciated highlight of the season has been the deeply half-assed “endorsements” that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Republican nominee for US Senate, has been reeling in. So much “OK, fine, he’s terrible, but vote for him anyway” going on there. Truly, it is a thing of beauty. If I were in charge of Democrat James Talarico’s campaign, I would honestly make that my whole campaign ad. Donald Trump can’t stop pointing out that Paxton is unattractive and dresses badly, which, even as an extremely shallow person, I would not say are his worst qualities.
“We’re going to go to Texas and work for Ken Paxton, who’s a great guy. I mean — so Ken Paxton, you might not like the way he dresses. And I say this, it’s so insulting to him, but I might as well say it,” Trump told Republican lawmakers last week. “You might not like the way he looks, you might not love his look, you might not love his television interviews, but he was the best attorney general in the country, perhaps.”
“And that speaks a lot louder than the suit he’s wearing that doesn’t look so great, or than anything, frankly. He was maybe the best attorney — and everybody admits it,” Trump continued, using “everybody” as shorthand for “people apparently unbothered by the time he wanted to give a pedophile a sentence of one day, or all the bribery and ‘abuse of office’ he was doing as state attorney general.”
I also quite enjoyed when his estranged wife, Texas state Senator Angela Paxton, still working through the “Biblical divorce” she initiated over his affairs with at least two women, put out a campaign ad begging people to vote for “the Republican team” even if you’d rather not vote for a particular “individual,” without even mentioning his name.
Paxton is doing pretty shockingly badly in the polls, and since no one can think of anything especially nice to say about him, they’ve decided to go gangbusters on James Talarico, the nice young Democrat who is beating him those polls.
So far, this has involved a variety of ridiculous tactics, including accusing him of being a secret vegan, creating a weird hoax claiming that he went to a mental institution for a week when in fact he just had the flu, which we already covered, and a whole lot of homophobia and transphobia. First they tried the “He’s for they/them and not for YOU!” tack, hoping that his (unfortunately somewhat lapsed) support for transgender people would turn voters against him. That hasn’t worked so well, even as they desperately cried “He said there were six genders!” into the night.
Now they are trying to insinuate that he is secretly trans or secretly gay, either of which would really only make sense if he were a Republican.
While most of MAGA was accusing Talarico of having secretly checked into a mental health facility during the time last week when he had the flu, former Arizona Senate/gubernatorial hopeful Kari Lake (currently the senior advisor to the United States Agency for Global Media) was accusing him of somehow having secretly had … bottom surgery?
In response to a post from Caroline Wren, the January 6 organizer and one of the architects of the mental institution hoax, about how Talarico couldn’t possibly have been off the campaign trail for that many days (it was nine days) without there being some kind of underlying, non-flu-related scandal, Lake posted a query she sent to some kind of AI bot asking how long it takes to recover from bottom surgery.
And even though the timing was nowhere near correct, Wren responded with a “This explains so much.”
You know, because who wouldn’t wait 37 whole years of their life to get major reconstructive surgery on their nether regions and then suddenly decide, one month from an election in which they are running for the US Senate, “How about now?”
In a similar vein, during a speech on Tuesday at the Tyler Pounds Regional Airport in Texas, JD Vance, in response to a male audience member crying out “I love you!” to him, responded “I love you too, sir. In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I’m the vice president, not James Talarico.”
It’s funny because the vice president is calling a man gay! A man who has been in a relationship with a woman for four years and would have literally no reason to be in the closet anyway because he’s not a Republican! This is something that someone like JD Vance thinks is a pretty serious burn, because of how he is stuck in a time warp where that’s still a thing. Or, alternately, he doesn’t actually give a shit about people being gay, given the fact that his big mentor is noted antichrist obsessor Peter Thiel, and he just thinks he’s talking to a bunch of backwards rubes who are going to go wild for that kind of thing.
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The fact that they’re going with these sorts of accusations, that their big line of attack is that Talarico is hiding something — whether it’s a stay in a mental institution or being a secret vegan, transgender, or gay person — says something. It says that they just don’t have enough real material to go after him on. They have to accuse him of hiding something terrible. Or, as the case is here, totally normal things that would not be anything anyone would need to cover up. Even if he did have a stay in a psychiatric hospital, it’s not as though that is something that would bother Republicans if he were also a Republican. After all, New Jersey Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr. mysteriously disappeared from Congress for four months without explanation, until it was revealed that he had been having a stay in an institution. Do they have any problem with him running for reelection? They sure don’t.
The fact is, they don’t have enough good to say about Paxton or enough bad to say about Talarico, so they just have to make stuff up. Or hope that burns that sound out of place in a world that is not a 1990s-era middle school cafeteria will take.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Surely *these* attacks on Talarico will lower food and fuel prices, and open the Strait of Hormuz.
Peter Heil Thiel's Meat Puppet/Gossip Spreader/Couch Fucker sez what now?