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| Tea Bagger Ken Cucci |
Move over Joe Walsh, Steve King, Michele Bachmann, Allen West, Bobby Jindal, Todd Akin, Jan Brewer, Sarah Palin and Zombie Ronald Reagan. The far-right has a new national hero, and it's Virginia Republican Ken Cuccinelli. That crazy bastard is going places!
On the day his chief rival for the GOP gubernatorial nod dropped out of contention, Virginia Republicans rallied around Cuccinelli — their attorney general who spearheaded a lawsuit against Obamacare and ruled in 2010 that police officers are allowed to check the immigration status of those they stop or arrest.
Cuccinelli hasn't won the governorship yet, mind you, but he's got all the right fixins to become the newest Republican national darling and/or national embarrassment. He hates all the right things, and is willing to spend heaps of other people's money to screw with the things he hates:
As attorney general, Cuccinelli sued the Environmental Protection Agency over greenhouse gas regulations. He lost a court fight to release the emails of a University of Virginia professor who studies climate change. He pushed for building regulations that make it harder for abortion clinics to operate. He issued advisory opinions that made it harder for schools to prevent students from bringing guns onto campus.
He's Arizona-plus levels of crabby about immigration:
He then lists accomplishments on immigration such as seeking to use the office of the attorney general to implement E-Verify for state employers, opposition to in-state tuition for illegal immigrants and the fact that he sponsored a law that allows termination of state contractors who knowingly employ illegal immigrants.
He's got the requisite people saying that once you get to know him, he seems real nice for an anti---everything far-right aggressively mean asshole:
“He’s totally normal. That’s what gets me,” [Dave] Albo said. “When Ken was in the Senate, we’d play pool late at night and drink beer. He’s funny. He’s nice. … The problem is it’s very hard to have a personal conversation with eight and a half million people. … He’s really going to have to go out and meet people. I just don’t think we win this thing on the air.”
And the right establishment Republicans worrying that maybe putting an anti-Obamacare, anti-immigrant, pro-guns-in-schools anti-abortion climate-denier out as the fresh new face of their party is maybe, you know, stupid:
“If the attorney general is the nominee, we don’t yet know what themes he will run on,” [Former VA Gov. Jim Gilmore] said after Bolling’s announcement. “We don’t know whether his background is something he can run on. … There’s no way of answering that question yet.”.All the elements are in place for the rise of a new tea party hero, so you'll be hearing a lot about Cuccinelli in the next year. It couldn't have come at a more opportune time, either. Conservative heroes tend to have a short shelf life, frequently losing their national appeal somewhere near the moment when people start actually paying attention to them. Let's watch, shall we?
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