TPM’s Duke Of Dukes: Jeet Heer Weighs In | Talking Points Memo

The expert weighs in.

While we’ve asked you, the readers, to help us decide who the worst of the worst are in this year’s TPM Duke of Dukes contest, we figured you could use a bit of persuasion one way or the other — a reminder as to why these scandal-plagued politicians’s badness is worth celebrating.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1349283

Did the former vice president really shoot a man in the face and get an apology from the man? Yes. It happened.

I disagree with many points you make here, but you will always have a measure of my respect for remembering this real-life satire. I actually predicted shortly after it happened that by the end of the week the victim would be apologizing. It really says a lot about the whole conservative movement.

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Not to be mysterious or overstate our disagreement. I noticed two inconsistencies:

  1. You say you don’t care much for sex scandals and then choose Christie over Weiner. Assigning Weiner responsibility for Trump’s win isn’t an obvious position.
  2. You generally favor political scandal over moral hypocrisy. I would include some of both in my responses, probably Falwell and Gannon.

Traficant, although expelled, was a more garden-variety crook

Yet Traficant gave us the immortal answer to the trivia question, can one run for congress from prison. (yes)

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Duncan*

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D’Souza.
Yes, Manafort actually did conspire with Russians to hack the 2016 election, but he was a garden-variety hood – after money to enrich himself within recognized norms. Read D’Souza from the beginning – he is insane!

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The Three Dukes As Duke Awardees

From my perspective as a Chicano political activist, the “triangulation” of Limbaugh, Hannity and Jones, would expand the excellent boundaries of this Blogster Award.

To date and for the past ten years, Rush Limbaugh, Hannity and etcetera have positioned their views to underscore the “outrage” that encourages the Right, to achieve a non-Constitutional election result, can only be viewed as the Big Grift, and to a lesser extent, the Small Graft. Consequently, their success at bringing forth an upgrade to their audience viewershift via the Fox Network, and which raises an abundant stash of cash for their privately-proffered wallets.

In closing, the Chicano voter, writ large, sees itself as the “cutting edge” of today’s progressive politics, and of course, which has been measured, according to the future impact for the reign of democratic-oriented demographics, in the years ahead, and will continue to be detrimental to the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity and Jones, among others. Thus, our wonderful Sonoran Desert, and which resides east of the Mississippi River, is at the forefront and more so, detrimental of the Right’s ever expansive cudgel of Propaganda Donors.

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Weighing in on the Cheney story. As I recall, it took a few days for Cheney to speak to the public about the shooting. All the speculation about why it was taking so long were off base. I heard some insider skinny via health professionals at the hospital that the Whittington guy was really, really close to death. It’s bad enough for the VP to shoot and injure someone, but to kill him? You need a finely crafted political statement for that.

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Doug Ford’s current tenure in Ontario is a sad reminder of his much more colorful brother. Doug is an equally horrible person, but not nearly as entertaining as Rob was.

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Surly there is a Steve Bannon scandal that can apply.