I n April 2010, Michael Best & Friedrich paralegal Kelly Teelin sent Rindfleisch a joke about someone whose dogs supposedly qualified for welfare because they are “mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can’t speak English and have no frigging clue who their Daddys are.”
Rindfleisch wrote back: “That is hilarious. And so true.”
In another email, sent in July 2010, Thomas Nardelli, chief of staff for Walker at Milwaukee County, forwarded Rindfleisch and undisclosed others a joke about someone who has a “nightmare” about turning into a black, Jewish, disabled gay man. “Oh God, please don’t tell me I’m a Democrat,” the email concludes.
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Media folks have just started poring over the massive throng of emails released this week that make Scott Walker look exactly like the guy most of us thought he was. Like Nixon, Walker’s attempt to throw underlings under the bus when a scandal emerged worked for a short period of time. Also like Nixon, eventually there was enough of a paper trail to tie him directly to the scandal.
In the case of Walker, he had always denied knowing anything about a secret email system set up at the county exec’s office that allowed his staff to do campaign work on county time in an undetected manner. Emails this week revealed he was not only aware of this, but that he was actively linked into what some staffers called the email “inner circle.”
A few other emails, including one to conservative blowhard/talk-show host Charlie Sykes encouraging cooperation between Walker’s office and Sykes, were interesting and possibly damaging to anyone other than Scott Walker. After all, this guy is slicker that buttered snot and he has that “headless chicken” thing going for him: Even after you kill it, it’s too stupid to know it’s dead, so it keeps walking around like an idiot.
The stuff that has drawn the most ire is stuff that matters the least. Emails reveal that Walker’s people hated political noob/former TV anchor/dead ringer for Barbie’s friend Skipper Rebecca Kleefisch.Emails contained general bitching about cats.Emails contained (gasp!) racist jokes that a) took too long to get to the punch line and b) were written in giant blue letters so that the elderly who still believe these stereotypes can read them with their failing eyes.
The sad part? None of this matters in terms of an election within the state. Sure, it might cost Walker a shot at the 2016 White House, but did anyone think we’d put an idiot governor with a penchant for bad ideas into a position of absolute power? Uh… Scratch that…
Still, in the state of Wisconsin, there are people who will “Stand with Scott Walker” until their legs atrophy or the lift system on their Lark 7 scooters give out. It’s not like there were a lot of people who were kind of on the fence about this guy and figured, “If only I knew for sure if he was in on this email thing, maybe I would vote against him…” Either you like him or you hate him and all this piling on won’t do anything but inflame both sides like a hemorrhoid treated with jalapeno juice.
Those who like him will continue to think that all that matters is this series of jobs he has created, even though they can’t actually see the jobs or tie any that exist to Walker.
Those who hate him will have a deeper hatred for him, not because there is more evidence that he’s a liar/douche/idiot/whatever, but because those people “standing” with him will continue to stand there and let him keep screwing up the state.