A few days ago, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers decided to bring home the Wisconsin National Guard troops that former Governor Scott Walker had sent to the Mexican border last summer, in response to President Donald Trump’s phony claim of a “crises of illegal immigration.” (Neat trick, that, at a time when illegal border crossings are actually at historic lows.)
Enter Republican U.S. Representative Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois who serves in the Wisconsin Air National Guard and recently spent a two-week deployment in Tucson, Arizona. He condemned Evers’s move, going as far as to say his unit stopped “a man crossing the border with 70 lbs of meth” and “had we not been there, that deadly drug would be on the streets,” and not just any streets: “Wonder the damage that would do in Milwaukee . . . ”
Like a cat that spends every day, all day, peering into a fish bowl waiting for the right moment to pounce, Scott Walker sprang into action—like he has done umpteen times before since he being tossed out of office last November.
Blending snark and intellectual dishonesty, Walker retweeted Kinzinger’s questionable comments while adding his own dollop of misinformation: “Looks like the kind of thing @BarackObama deployed 1,200 members of the National Guard to deal with: DRUGS along the border.”
Like a cat that spends every day, all day, peering into a fish bowl waiting for the right moment to pounce, Scott Walker sprang into action.
In reality, the drugs in this incident were sniffed-out by the K9 unit and came across the border like nearly all illegal drugs from Mexico—at a legal border crossing inside the vehicle of a legal visitor. The Border Patrol’s press release at the time makes no mention of the National Guard playing any role in the arrest. And Obama did send national guard troops, but it was in a vain attempt to appease Republicans’ impossible demand that the 2,000-mile border be 100 percent sealed before they would consider an immigration reform bill.
But the truth is that every day is like this with Walker.
It’s tempting to call him a sore loser, but that’s not right. When Nixon said, “You won’t have me to kick around anymore,” he left! Walker is more like a psycho ex that just won’t leave because he’s in denial that the relationship is really over and he’s not governor any longer. The guy went from not giving a concession speech, to insisting that voters didn’t reject him, and even claiming that he’d really kinda won. After all, he said, he got more votes than when Tommy Thompson last ran for governor twenty years ago!
Walker’s state of denial seemed to be the underlying justification for the lame duck “zombie” session that essentially allowed Republicans to undo the results of the election they lost. But Walker actually got worse after he officially moved out of the governor’s office in January. Now he’s trolling the current governor on a near-daily basis on Twitter—like this week, when he retweeted a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporter pointing out tax increases in Evers’s proposed state budget.
And in the time that remains, Walker is picking fights with national Democrats, including U.S Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
When AOC made some perfectly reasonable comments about fairer taxation, Walker countered with a silly straw man argument, by yelling “Socialism!” and then conflating the S-word with totalitarian communism.
“[T]he socialist empire of the Soviet Union fell because it didn’t work,” Walker tweeted. “Just as it doesn’t work in countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua or North Korea.”
Using this silly logic, anyone—including Walker himself—who has ever supported the basic idea of taxes to fund a government is a Karl Marx-spooning totalitarian communist.
Since this dust-up, Walker has tweeted at or mentioned AOC nineteen additional times with equally dumb lines of troll attacks.
Earlier this week, Walker really went coo-coo for CoCoa Puffs, though, making a strawman so big you could see it from space. At the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, Walker said during a speech: “It is murder if you take the baby home and kill the baby at home, it’s murder.” Thanks, Captain Obvious.
The absurd point Walker was trying to make was a reference to New York’s recent passage of a bill that allows abortions at any time in a pregnancy if a women’s health is in jeopardy. Walker and the rest of the far right have falsely claimed this could somehow result in a “live birth abortion. Infanticide.”
Keep in mind, this is the same guy who once said there didn’t need to be an exception for abortion when a mother’s life is in danger, because in Dr. Walker’s expert opinion, “Medically that’s just a non-issue.”
Other times, Walker’s social media presence is just pathetically sad. During the campaign, his common refrain was the sunglasses emoji with some remark about how well Wisconsin doing and “our future is so bright, I gotta wear shades”—referencing the 1986 Timbuk3 hit. Soon he would often just post some positive news story with a standalone sunglasses emoji.
A few weeks ago, Walker was vacationing in Florida and we saw the return of the sunglasses emoji, with Walker tweeting, “Nice to have a few days to relax after 8 busy years!”
Who knew that his future in trolling was so bright.