Click here for my updated post, entitled "Carl Paladino - A Complete Disgrace (Updated)." The scumball was given 24 hours to resign his position on the Buffalo school board. (The vote was 6-2 against him; I hope the two people who cast votes in his favor lose re-election to that prestigious organization, the Buffalo School Board, bigly. I hope their loss is yuge.)
Here's the thing: Carl Paladino, loathsome though he is, is a solidly mainstream Republican political figure in the state of New York. He didn't quietly slither in out of some dank, fetid swamp; he was the Republican candidate for governor of New York in the last election, in 2010. In the primary, he defeated Rick Lazio, a former congressman who had been defeated by Hillary Clinton in a 2000 senatorial race, by a 2-to-1 margin, and he won 29% of the votes in the general election; Andrew Cuomo, the Democrat, got 57%.
Paladino said outrageous, ugly, despicable things about President Obama and the First Lady, Michelle. Beyond the pale -- unacceptable! Condemned by one and all.
But the thing is, those ugly, despicable things were basically mainstream Republican thought; it's just that Paladino pushed things too far. If he were given the power of hindsight and could see the widespread disapproval his statements generated, and if he could just dial his rhetoric back one notch and see the result -- and if he still couldn't take the heat, and if he could dial it back another notch -- and that was still pretty messy, and he could dial it back one notch more -- he would find himself within the protective umbrella of Republican support. If he had just been a little less extreme, Fox News and Hannity and Breitbart would have leapt to his support, and he'd have been okay -- well, not just okay, but a Republican cause, a symbol of left-wing hatred and political correctness run amok, smothering conservative free speech.
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