Here’s a (somewhat) rhetorical question for your Presidents’ Day pondering: what is in the water in the 20th Judicial District?
I ask because, fresh from the district that brought us Mike Maggio’s adventures in bribery and improper judicial commentary comes Kent Tester, candidate for District Judge. And…
well, there’s really no comfortable segue into something like this, so I’m just going to put it right here (note–the text messages in gray are from Mr. Tester):
Mr. Tester’s “hair lipped Niger1 [sic] whore” is a reference to Van Buren County Clerk Pam Bradford, who defeated Angie Hutchins to win that seat. You may recall Ms. Bradford from her embarrassing attempts to be the next Kim Davis. (Ms. Hutchins, the Democrat in that race, either works or worked for Mr. Tester, which one suspects is the reason behind this kind of insane overreaction to a county clerk’s race.)
If her being a Republican from Van Buren County didn’t make it clear, it is worth noting Ms. Bradford is white. This fact, obviously, does not help Mr. Tester or excuse his comment; if anything, it only serves to make the comment that much stranger, since it shows that Mr. Tester considers that racial epithet to have universal application if he is angry enough.
So…riddle me this: seeing how willy-nilly Mr. Tester is when throwing around racist comments, how in the world could he presume to sit as a judge? I can only imagine the number of lawyers who practice regularly in district court over there who will have a recusal argument ready to go in every case where the client is a minority, and every argument will reference the text above. That’s going to be a nightmare for the administration of justice in that district at the very least.
If that were the only knock against Mr. Tester as a judicial candidate, I would still have written this post, because it truly is evidence of poor judgment to put comments like that in print and assume that they will never come back to bite you. Except, as you might suspect, that’s not the only red flag flying over the Tester campaign.
You see, Mr. Tester’s mailers and Facebook page repeatedly tout that he’s a “lifelong conservative.” Case in point:
Hell, he didn’t just say he was a lifelong conservative; he literally put “CONSERVATIVE” in bold font and underlined it! He must mean it and have the history to back it up! He certainly doesn’t sound like the type who would have voted in 10 of the last 13 Democratic primaries!
Oh…
Look…I could see someone, even a “lifelong conservative” having one or two primaries where he voted in the other party’s race. Hell, I’ve done it a couple times, simply because there was no race on the Democratic side that was in question and I wanted to vote for the lesser of evils in a specific Republican race. But there’s a big difference between an occasional cross-party primary ballot in specific circumstances and just generally voting in the Democratic primary nearly every single time.
Stated differently, how many times do you think Stanley Rapert or David Meeks–both professed lifelong conservatives in that same district–have voted in Democratic primaries since 1998? I’m willing to bet it is less than three times total.
Point being, Mr. Tester’s claim that he’s a “lifelong conservative” seems like less of a statement of fact or political belief and more like a lie designed to fool the people of the 20th Judicial District into voting for him, despite his actual political leanings.
It seems strange, I’m sure, for this blog to call out a Democrat who is trying to sneakily run as a Republican, but it’s really not. At the end of the day, this blog endeavors to promote transparency and accountability, regardless of party affiliation.
More importantly, my political leanings are such that I will always point out when it appears that a judicial candidate–at any level–is a liar and a racist.
I would hope that anyone else would do the same thing, given the opportunity.
Damn you, autocorrect!↩