Mother of mercy, is this the end of T-Paw?

Let us pause for a moment to mourn the passing of Tim Pawlenty's political career. Once a serious hunk o'presidential timber, his national ambitions went a'glimmering in 2011, when he lost the last of the absurd Iowa Straw Polls—aka Put White People On a Bus and Feed 'Em Lunch Caucus—to fellow Minnesotan Michele Bachmann and promptly withdrew. On Tuesday night, T-Paw tried for a comeback term as governor of Minnesota and he got crisped by a county commissioner named Jeff Johnson, a guy Pawlenty outspent 3-1.

In response, Pawlenty summoned up the violins. From The Washington Post:

“The Republican Party has shifted,” he said, according to a reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, who was in attendance. “It is the era of Trump, and I’m just not a Trump-like politician."

Let us pause, then, for a moment of silence as Tim Pawlenty goes back to his job lobbying for the financial services industry as any good American patriot would.

OK, that's long enough.

Marcus Ingram Getty Images

Back when the famous Access Hollywood tape came out, T-Paw opined, rightly, that El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago was "unhinged and unfit for office." In the closing days of the campaign—and, as Dave Barry often warns, I am not making this up—Jeff Johnson made his own stalwart defense of Trump's pussy-grabbing the center of his homestretch advertising.

"Tim Pawlenty stuck his finger in the wind,” Johnson said in his closing ad, which condemned Pawlenty’s criticism of Trump after the release of the Access Hollywood tape in October 2016. “I won’t panic when it matters most.”

When your party's presidential candidate confesses on tape to sexual assault, that's when "it matters most." Gotcha.

It has become a kind of cliche around the shebeen, but it's worth repeating: None of this had to happen, but, since Ronald Reagan attached the modern Republican Party to some of the ur-fantasies of movement conservatism—supply-side economics chief among them—the GOP has been reeling steadily toward the moment when this president*, or someone very much like him, would be elected. If Tim Pawlenty is only noticing this now, he hasn't been paying attention—which is odd because, if I'd have been passed over for a vice-presidential nomination in favor of Sarah Palin the way Pawlenty was in 2008, I might have sensed that something had gone amiss in the frontal lobes of the Republican Party. Tim Pawlenty, then, is the latest casualty of the prion disease.

JEFF KOWALSKY Getty Images

Across the border in Wisconsin, the state continues to move closer to a decision point over whether it will revive and redeem its formidable historical legacy in progressive politics, or move even closer to losing it forever. In the First Congressional District, Paul Ryan's old home base for zombie-eyed granny starving, steelworker Randy Bryce got through a rougher Democratic primary than anyone expected he would have, and he'll face Bryan Steil, who used to work on Ryan's staff.

Most notable about the results in that district was the fact that Paul Nehlen, an actual fascist, got about 12 percent of the vote. Some 6,000-odd of Paul Ryan's fellow Wisconsinites voted to put a by-god gauleiter in the United States Congress. Of all the places where progressive politics has been under siege in this country by corporate oligarchy and extremist ideology, Wisconsin has been the most conspicuous test case.

Nehlen at a rally for Roy Moore in December Bill Clark Getty Images

Nowhere is that more obvious than in the state's race for the U.S. Senate. Incumbent Democrat Tammy Baldwin is one of the most liberal members of that body, while Republican candidate Leah Vukmir, who held off a luxuriously financed—if fundamentally doomed—challenge by Kevin Nicholson, enlivened the campaign with an ad in which she sat at her kitchen table, a gold cross around her neck and a holstered handgun by her side. During the fight over the nomination of Gina Haspel to head the CIA, a nomination Baldwin opposed, Vukmir's campaign chided Baldwin for being on "Team Terrorist," a claim so outrageously mendacious that even Baldwin's fellow senator, Republican Ron (Shreds of Freedom) Johnson gagged on it. If there ever was a clear-cut choice to be made, the Wisconsin Senate race is it.

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

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