Politics and show business have overlapped for a long time, and as a result it’s become routine to compare politicians to actors. What’s not at all routine is likening a politician to a porn star, but Daily Kos blogger Jon Perr went there on Sunday.
“With his rhetorical guns blazing at every enemy of Wall Street Republicans and tea party conservatives alike, [Scott] Walker has emerged straight from central casting as a Tarantino-like hero for the GOP,” wrote Perr. “Like them, he believes his Democratic foes aren't just wrong, but unambiguously evil...He talks and fights tough, which for the right wing is not a means but an end in itself.”
Perr touched on the weaknesses of several other Republican presidential aspirants before concluding, “For the GOP's hardliners and money men hoping to write the script for 2016, that leaves the one man who inflicted beatings on progressive groups and Democratic candidates alike and emerged victorious: Scott Walker, Republican porn star.”
From Perr’s piece (bolding added):
With his rhetorical guns blazing at every enemy of Wall Street Republicans and tea party conservatives alike, Walker has emerged straight from central casting as a Tarantino-like hero for the GOP. For the faithful, he is unambiguously good. Like them, he believes his Democratic foes aren't just wrong, but unambiguously evil…He talks and fights tough, which for the right wing is not a means but an end in itself. And after the Republicans' two humiliating defeats at the hands of Barack Obama, Walker possesses the most important quality of them all. At the end of the movie, he wins.
Walker's rapidly evolving persona goes well beyond the post-Vietnam lesson of Rambo ("Do we get to win this time?") that so entranced President Ronald Reagan…As with the Nazi leaders and Southern slaveholders in Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained respectively, he slaughters the evil-doers of his age and thus rewrites history itself. It's no wonder Tarantino's actors described the brutal justice meted out by Jewish-American commandos and French resistance fighters to Hitler and his minions as "Jewish porn."
That's why the Scott Walker story belongs to a genre that could aptly be called "Republican porn"…
…[The Washington Monthly’s Ed] Kilgore presciently predicted Walker's emergence as a front-runner, [but] he could not have anticipated Scott Walker's passion play performed at and after Rep. Steve King's Iowa Freedom [Summit] last month. In Walker's tale of his near Christ-like suffering, he almost died for liberals' sins:
…Walker talked about some of the death threats made against him by those who opposed his conservative reforms. One threatened to "gut my wife like a deer," and another note said that if his wife didn't stop him, he'd be "the first Wisconsin governor ever assassinated," he said…
"Part of me looks back and thinks that maybe God put me and my family through all this for a purpose - and it wasn't just to get things done in Wisconsin, and it wasn't just to win all those elections in a state that normally doesn't go Republican. Maybe it was to set us to ... help get our country on the right track."
For Walker, getting the country on the right track means taking the confrontational style that won him the state elections of 2010, 2012 ,and 2014 national. And that means taking on all the groups Republicans love to hate, financed by the Republican mega-donors who hate them too…
For the schadenfreude enthusiasts who play such a key role in the early Republican primary contests, no other GOP White House hopeful can match Scott Walker's performance. He's 3 and 0 in a state Republicans haven't carried in a presidential contest since 1984. Culture warriors like Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, and Bobby Jindal will only be bit players. While Jeb Bush has eclipsed Chris Christie, his family taint and support for Common Core education standards and immigration reform won't play well with the base. (As with Mitt Romney in 2012, his cash advantage is another matter.) The idiosyncrasies of the erratic Rand Paul are becoming increasingly evident. Sen. Ted Cruz, who has waged many battles and lost them all, is only fit to be cast as a tea party Don Quixote.
For the GOP's hardliners and money men hoping to write the script for 2016, that leaves the one man who inflicted beatings on progressive groups and Democratic candidates alike and emerged victorious: Scott Walker, Republican porn star.
