What is it about many modern day Republican candidates?
If they win an election, everything is on the up and up. If they lose, something was amiss and certainly unfair.
Defeated Supreme Court candidate Dan Kelly is the most recent example. After it became clear Tuesday night that Janet Protasiewicz would defeat him by a wide margin, he had nothing but bad things to say about his opponent.
She's a serial liar, he proclaimed in a speech at the swank Heidel House Hotel in Green Lake.
"I wish that in a circumstance like this, I would be able to concede to a worthy opponent," he told his assembled supporters. "But I do not have a worthy opponent to which I can concede."
Kelly called Protasiewicz's campaign "deeply deceitful, dishonorable and despicable."
"My opponent is a serial liar," he continued. "She's disregarded judicial ethics; she's demeaned the judiciary with her behavior. This is the future that we have to look forward to in Wisconsin."
This from the candidate whose campaign backers, including Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, sponsored an ad that used a Milwaukee rape victim's case to declare that Protasiewicz had a soft spot in her heart for sexual predators.
The ad, which claimed the Milwaukee judge had unleashed the perpetrator to again prey on the innocent, so upset the victim that she spoke out in Protasiewicz's defense.
"It immediately took my breath away," she said of the ad. "To see it in action, I wondered if there was any thought put into the human beings behind the cases."
Both sides in the campaign used inflammatory, low-ball TV spots, but for Kelly to suggest he was above it all is nothing short of laughable. In fact, the former justice was up on TV early and often suggesting his opponent was soft on criminals, cherry picking a handful of sentences out of the hundreds she had administered while on the circuit court bench.
What was so ludicrous about all those multimillion dollar attack ads is that Supreme Court justices don't rule on such cases in the first place.
Kelly closed his concession talk with, "I wish Wisconsin the best of luck, because I think it’s going to need it."
No, it's the other way around. Kelly, absurdly claiming that he would only rule on the principles of law and not his political beliefs, was all set to rubber stamp the right-wing Republican legislative agenda, as had the justice he was hoping to replace, Patience Roggensack. The gerrymanderers, the opponents of a woman's right to choose, the vote suppressors were all lined up.
Lucky for us, the voters sent them away.
