Fearing loss of control, WI GOP & far-right goes Cruzing

It's been astonishing to watch the far-right GOP establishment in Wisconsin led by AM talk radio and embodied by Gov. Scott Walker embrace the unapologetically extremist Ted Cruz - - he who supports making the Middle East glow from carpet bombing and wants to set up police states in "Muslim neighborhoods" in America  - - because the far right establishment in Wisconsin says that Donald Trump is too extreme.

Talk about short memories and contradiction.

The GOP establishment in Wisconsin was ever so happy to embrace some very far-right people and tendencies when party regulars needed that people-power and energy to save Walker - - he who called himself the "original Tea Party in Wisconsin - - and also, by extension to save themselves and their partisan privilege, too.

Remember when the GOP came to Racine County for the Save Walker Recall Rallies of all Rallies? The Racine Journal Times was there: 

'On Tuesday we save Wisconsin,' Ryan tells huge Racine TEA Party rally

Speaker after speaker stated and restated the national interest in, and importance of, Tuesday’s recall elections during a 2-hour Racine TEA Party PAC rally on Saturday morning at Gorney Park, 8201 Nicholson Road. The event drew an estimated 4,000 people, one speaker said, and featured a series of major Republican politicians and conservative commentators... 

Their accompanying, repeated message was: Get out as many like-minded voters as you can to rebuff Tuesday’s attempted recall of Gov. Scott Walker, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and state Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine. The latter two spoke during the rally.

Walker amped-up the right-wing by dog-whistling loudly in Waukesha County during the same campaign that his re-election was the only thing preventing Wisconsin from resembling that urban area just down the highway.

People do not want to see Wisconsin "become another Milwaukee," Walker said.

And who amplified that same message in the 2014 campaign when he labeled public assistance recipients as lazy, X-Box couch potatoes who needed to be drug-tested before getting food stamps which he also cut back.

But look what's happened since.

Walker fell flat on the presidential stage because the angry far-right prefers the billionaire celebrity outsider Trump to careerist insiders like Walker and Ryan and elite DC power brokers like Priebus. 

Which explains the establishment talk radio freakout here of late over Trump's seizure of the GOP nomination process which Priebus set up but which played right into Trump's hands - - and that loss of control has come to threaten the sweet deal which party insiders and funders have made for themselves in Wisconsin over the last few years that has guaranteed:

*  Self-serving, favor-dispensing, gerry-mandering majorities in both houses of the Legislature;

*  Self-serving, favor-dispensing rulings by State Supreme Court;

*  Self-serving, favor-dispensing hands on the profitable levers of power at key regulatory agencies like the now-weakened Government Accountability Board, and the chamber of commerce-mentalty Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the un-apologetically pro-corporate Wisconsin Public Service Commission, the Attorney General's Office and others.

And others across all of state government now more politically-managed than ever through Act 10 and a deliberately politicized and weakened civil service.

No wonder that GOP elites and their friends on the AM radio airwaves are "all in" for Cruz, as Walker put it Tuesday, to stop Trump - - he figured out how to co-opt the same far-right constituencies which the GOP and the talkers nurtured as theirs to manipulate while revealing the cynicism behind the establishment's control.

Which means that the farthest right-wingers in grassroots Wisconsin want Trump and the even greater chaos than the havoc Walker pledged to wreak in Washington.

Leaving it to a self-serving, back-in-the-game Walker and his allies to set up the anti-Trump barricades.

When the havocwreakers pose as the guardians of order, carpet bombs, official anti-Muslim street patrols, self-serving favoritism and crushing ironies are part of the bargain. 

It's all head-shaking and deeply ironic, but saying that doesn't feel adequate.