We've been keeping an eye on the one particular election for a state Supreme Court. One of the candidates is Rebecca Bradley, a judicial protégé of Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin. Bradley was appointed by Walker to replace a justice who'd died. This was the third time Walker had appointed Bradley, in each case sending her one rung higher on the ladder. Given Walker's unceasing efforts to turn the state into a self-perpetuating banana republic, it would probably behoove the citizens not to allow him to get a death grip on the state judiciary, too. (Bradley is almost entirely a creature of the same local conservative chop-shops that produced Walker's career.) So, now, with Bradley standing for election for a full term against state appeals court judge JoAnne Kloppenburg, the campaign is boiling over, and Bradley has managed to get pretty well scalded by her past.

The column and letters to the editor include these statements: "Perhaps AIDS Awareness should seek to educate us with their misdirected compassion for the degenerates who basically commit suicide through their behavior."

"But the homosexuals and drug addicts who do essentially kill themselves and others through their own behavior deservedly receive none of my sympathy."

"This brings me to my next point—why is a student government on a Catholic campus attempting to bring legitimacy to an abnormal sexual preference?"

"Heterosexual sex is very healthy in a loving martial relationship. Homosexual sex, however, kills."

"I will certainly characterize whomever transferred their infected blood (to a transfusion recipient) a homosexual or drug-addicted degenerate and a murderer."

"We've just had an election (in 1992) which proves the majority of voters are either totally stupid or entirely evil."

Clinton "supports the Freedom of Choice Act, which will allow women to mutilate and dismember their helpless children through their ninth month of pregnancy. Anyone who could consciously vote for such a murderer is obviously immoral."

OK, it was almost 25 years ago. We all do, say, and think silly things in college. But, here's the thing. It's a little personal. Bradley wrote this noxious swill for the opinion section of The Marquette Tribune. A little more than 40 years ago, I was the editor of that very section of that very newspaper. I don't recall publishing anything that called people "queers," and that was back in the Stone Age. Editorial policy seems to have changed through the years. I mean, wow.

One will be better off contracting AIDS than developing cancer, because those afflicted with the politically correct disease will be getting all the funding. How sad that the lives of degenerate drug addicts and queers are valued more than the innocent victims of more prevalent ailments.

This was fairly common talk back in the early 1990s in those fertile fields of conservative thought from which Trumpism has finally emerged in full bloom this year. Her career has been carefully nurtured within the other flora from those same fields—Heritage, the Club For Growth, the Federalist Society, and something called the Wisconsin Institute For Law And Liberty, which is run by a litigious law professor at our common alma mater named Rick Esenberg. (Professor Esenberg, unsurprisingly, was rather bothered by the Obergefell decision.) And, no, I certainly wouldn't want to be judged today by something I'd written in college, but as someone with a vested interest in the university and its journalism program and its newspaper, I'd like to say for the record that I hope Rebecca Bradley loses by ten million votes.

Oh, and an elected judiciary remains the Second Worst Idea In American Politics.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io