Time for GOP to purge the 'wackos'

This post was updated on Aug. 20, 2013, at 10:55 a.m.


In Washington, they’re known as “crazies,” “wacko birds” or “wack-a-doodles.”
Mainstream Republicans such as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. John McCain have tried to distance the GOP from those right-wingers who engage in outrageous actions or embarrassing comments.
Their targets? Reps. Steve King of Iowa, Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, Louie Gomert of Texas, Steve Stockman of Texas and former congressman Allen West of Florida.

To their credit, House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor quickly jumped on King’s recent racist remarks. He said a significant percentage of American Hispanics are drug runners whose cantaloupe-sized calves indicate that they spend their days hauling heavy bags of marijuana across the U.S.-Mexican border.
King has not backed down at all from that ridiculous comment, but Boehner and Cantor have made it clear that idiotic statements are not what the GOP is all about.



Attorney General Bill Schuette with Doug Sednquist (right)
 and radio show co-host Devin Lawrence 

In Lansing, the story is very different. State Republican leaders have mostly hoped that shameful behavior by some party officials will quietly fade away.
A group of far-right instigators who have embarrassed the party have been labeled “malcontents,” “loud-mouthed holier-than-thous,” and “low-level thugs.” But the GOP leadership has not taken a stand.

During the past week, Doug Sedenquist, vice chair of the Delta County Republican Party and a talk-radio host on a conservative Upper Peninsula station, agreed to plead guilty to charges that he engaged police in a standoff in a Wisconsin mall parking lot while armed with a rifle.
It appears Sedenquist is following in the footsteps of his sidekick, fellow radio talker Randy Bishop, aka “Trucker Randy.” Several years ago, Trucker Randy pleaded guilty to two fraud felonies in Macomb County and then fled to northern Michigan, emerging as the chairman of the Antrim County GOP and a self-proclaimed leader of the state’s tea party movement.

Sedenquist and Lt. Gov. Brian Calley

At this point in the story, it should be pointed out that state Attorney General Bill Schuette, the state’s top law enforcement official, and Lt. Gov. Brian Calley, Michigan’s second in command, still pal around with Trucker Randy and Sedenquist, who also serves on the Republic state committee.
Shortly after a distraught Sedenquist was arrested in the Green Bay area standoff for threatening to instigate a “death by cop” suicide, Schuette appeared on his radio program. A few months later, Calley was seen posing for photos with Sedenquist.
What’s more, the police report in the Wisconsin incident indicates that Sedenquist’s marriage fell apart after he allegedly battered his daughters, according to the Green Bay Press Gazette.

Family values? I don’t think so.

Worse yet for the GOP, the day after he agreed to a guilty plea that could result in significant prison time, Sedenquist was back on the air interviewing the infamous state Rep. Dave Agema.
Earlier this year, Agema made homophobic public statements and then backed them up by citing the claims of a white supremacist. A grassroots GOP outcry ensued, calling for Agema to resign his seat as one of two Michigan members of the Republican National Committee.
But the national and state party leadership, including Gov. Snyder, stayed quiet and Agema remains on the RNC. He remains a face of the Republican Party.

What a scene that must have been last week: Sedenquist and Agema chatting on a radio station (which claims to reach 30 counties), no doubt each trying to outdo the other in terms of how far to the right they can go.
As for Trucker Randy, he said on his radio show earlier this week that mainstream Republicans don’t just “drink the Kool-Aid,” as the saying goes. They pour it into their rectum.

Why is this guy a county party chairman?

According to state documents and news reports, he was convicted of the two felony fraud charges after trying to salvage a Macomb County subdivision he hoped to build during the boom times of 1998. He declared bankruptcy, lost his builder’s license, was accused of not paying his federal and state taxes and, after fraudulently claiming in writing that he had never been convicted of a felony, lost his real estate broker’s license in 2001.

Trucker Randy

A judge declared that Trucker Randy’s fraudulent behavior “illustrates his inability to serve the public in an open and honest manner and his lack of good moral character.”

Not surprisingly, Trucker Randy avoided the spotlight after that for nearly a decade. But, with the help of incendiary comments on Facebook, a few years ago he began portraying himself as the leader of a tea party faction.
In 2012 he sent emails claiming that, according to “rumors” he had heard, state Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville had engaged in marital infidelities. One of his right-wing buddies, R. Alan Bain joined in the attack and claimed that Richardville’s wife was partially to blame because she knew about his alleged affairs and took no action.
GOP senators called the move a disgusting blackmail attempt to get Richardville, who was judged by the tea party to be too moderate for the Michigan Republicans, to resign as GOP leader. Richardville, who had a huge personal stake in this whole mess, called for an apology.

Trucker Randy with Lt.Gov. Brian Calley (left) and Gov. Rick and Sue Snyder

Yet, it was the tea party activists who stepped up at the time and demanded that the GOP denounce Trucker Randy and Bain and purge far-right Republicans who were embarrassing the party.

Closer to home, it’s important to note that an upcoming public forum in Utica, which is designed to celebrate Michigan’s right-to-work law, will feature a panel discussion moderated by Trucker Randy. The panel will include two prominent ultraconservatives, Gary Glenn and Terry Bowman, who have been sharply criticized in the past for failing to disassociate from Trucker Randy.
The third member of the panel and the organizer of this September event is Brian Pannebecker of Shelby Township, who has already announced his GOP candidacy for 2014 for state House. Here’s the awkward part: Pannebecker is an aide to state Sen. Jack Brandenburg; Brandenburg was the senator who used the phrase “low-level thugs” to describe Trucker Randy and his crew in 2012.

These are the tangled webs woven within today’s divided GOP. It’s time for the Republican leaders to apply some political pesticide.