Joe Arpaio, the disgraced Arizona sheriff to whom the label of "concentration camp enthusiast" can be applied, incredibly, without an ounce of hyperbole, has declared his intention to seek his state's Senate seat that will be vacated by the retiring Jeff Flake in 2018. And while Flake quickly denounced Arpaio and predicted that his fledgling candidacy wouldn't last much longer than the time it takes to write about it, the right-wing propaganda machine that is Fox News is already doing its part to get him elected anyway.

Here are some of the verbatim questions that the folks at Fox and Friends elected to ask Arpaio, who was pardoned for his federal crimes by Donald Trump last summer in a real "birds of a feather"-type stunt, during a brief interview this morning.

1. “At 85, why do you want to do this?”

2. "How would you like to respond to Senator Flake"?

3. "With your long career as a sheriff, what part of that experience would be helpful in the U.S. Senate?"

4. "Do you think you would be using [your] experience—that it would be helpful to drain the swamp?"

5. "During the commercial, you said Donald Trump was a heroic figure to you, and he wants to drain the swamp. If you were in the Senate, would you do that as well?"

At no point during the exchange did host Steve Doocy ask Arpaio whether he believes that his fitness to serve in the upper chamber of Congress might be fairly called into question given his extremely-high-profile history of, among many other things, withholding medical treatment from inmates, settling wrongful death lawsuits for millions of dollars, ignoring lawful court orders, being convicted of federal crimes, and/or making unapologetic racial profiling the entire thrust of his law enforcement ideology. At no point did he even make an oblique reference to these objective facts. Instead, the program presented Arpaio to viewers as a sort of folksy, no-nonsense grandfather-type ready to take Washington by storm. Referring to this astonishing collective omission as “journalistic malpractice” would be an insult to actual journalists everywhere. Doocy even closed by accidentally referring to his guest as "Senator" Arpaio.

As my colleague Luke Darby wrote yesterday, Roy Moore may have lost his Senate seat after being exposed as a credibly-accused child predator, but there are many monstrous bigots like him who remain very eager to take their shot at mainstream success. The forces that resulted in the election of of Donald Trump have emboldened many of those who used to operate at society’s fringes, but who now realize that their pipe-dream political ambitions might not be as unrealistic as they once assumed.

And this is how, despite every one of their objectionable characteristics that would be disqualifying in any normal universe, at least some of these candidates will end up with a better-than-zero chance at winning, in November and beyond: by benefitting from the fact that this brand of fawning, uncritical treatment from the mouths of nakedly partisan cheerleaders gets beamed directly into the homes of voters everywhere.