If you are the type of person who has not yet given up completely on what passes for an editorial section at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, you might have seen the October 28, 2022 op-ed in which the paper listed a bunch of different endorsements for races that the writer apparently did not think warranted individual articles.1 In between acting like they aren’t a partisan rag by endorsing Andrew Collins (D, HD-73), the op-ed droned on in praise of sentient meatsuits like Karilyn Brown (R, HD-67) and Carlton Wing (R, HD-70),2 the paper was effusive about noted wacko and serial college quitter Heather Turchi, who is running against incumbent Rep. Ashley Hudson for House District 75.
How effusive were they? Well, as the paper put it:
“We’re trying to find a policy matter on which we disagree with Heather Turchi. But we can’t find one in our notes.” Hmm, interesting. But, like, what if Heather had a history of saying some real crazy-pants stuff in a video that she tried to scrub from the internet, but that we already had a copy of?3 Would the D-G still agree with her across the board?
Say, for instance, that Turchi had ranted about how Democrats were like Hitler and Stalin, who were “total psychopaths” that would kill anyone who opposed them?
I won’t sit here and pretend like District 75 in West Little Rock isn’t conservative, but, considering this is a district that used to include two different synagogues, I have trouble believing “that most of District 75’s residents would agree with her policy stands, too.”4
Or, let’s see, what if Turchi ranted about how the 2020 election was “stolen”? Does the Democrat-Gazette’s editorial staff agree with election denialism?
How about if Turchi went on an unhinged rant about how some “little cocktail of apathy and ignorance” landed American “in bed with communism”? Is the D-G cosigning that?
The op-ed author could find nothing to disagree with Turchi about? Not even, say, her belief that we are “at war with our government,” which led her to post insane, threatening videos on Instagram (that she has since deleted)?
Maybe the Democrat-Gazette also agrees that COVID-19 was a “plandemic”?
What about the allegation that schools are “indoctrinating our kids” because we took God out of schools?
You know…I write all of that above fully aware that, yeah, the person who wrote that editorial for the Democrat-Gazette probably does agree with Heather Turchi on a lot of this stuff. That is how low the editorial part of that paper has fallen.
That said, I do not believe that “most of District 75” agrees with this garbage. That district, in a slightly different configuration, voted for Ashley Hudson two years ago over then-incumbent Jim Sorvillo. Sorvillo sucked in myriad ways as a candidate, but he wasn’t nearly as off-the-rails as Heather Beech Turchi. Surely even District 75 won’t have a majority of people vote for someone who would be well to the right of most Jonesboro Republicans.
It’s telling, however, that–given everything we know about Heather Turchi–the Democrat-Gazette had the temerity to refer to her as a “non-ideological Republican.”
I guess when you sell your soul to be Walter Hussman’s mouthpiece, words stop having much meaning.
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That link goes to the ADG story, but through the site 12-foot Ladder, which removes the paywall. I’m not saying that you should always use 12FL to avoid ADG paywalls; I’m just saying that, every time you do, you annoy Walter Hussman, which should always be a person’s goal.↩
Neither of whom is worth a warm squirt of pee, even if they were on fire.↩
That’s foreshadowing, baybeeee!↩
As for the op-ed’s use of “Ivory Soap-certain,” I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that is a euphemism for “99.44%” or something else. I am not very fluent in Boomer.↩