Senator's response to right-wing kooks: "Screw you"

Walker

Dennis Lennox, columnist for our sister paper, the Mount Pleasant Morning Sun, unloaded on the tea party insurgents in the wake of last weekend’s Michigan Republican Party soirée on Mackinac Island.

In his column, Lennox, a GOP activist, reflects on the Mackinac buzz about state Sen. Howard Walker, who just days before the island get-together responded to one of the most irritating right-wing tea partiers in a way that had some longtime Republicans cheering.

Sommerfield

“Screw you,” was Walker’s on-camera response after being taunted by Brian Sommerfield. A two-time loser in his runs for Petoskey mayor, Sommerfield co-hosts a talk-radio show  

 with the infamous “Trucker Randy” Bishop (a two-time felon) and he is buddies with another far-right radio host, Doug Sedenquist (who is preparing to plead guilty in a Wisconsin incident in which he allegedly engaged police in a standoff while armed with a rifle).

Walker, from Traverse City, said what a lot of mainstream Republicans wish they could say to this kooky tea party trio. At a Saturday breakfast event on the island, Lennox noted, former Michigan GOP Chairman Saul Anuzis asserted that the true RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) are these new insurgents who want to take their ball and go home after losing in the primaries. Failing to vote in November for the party’s nominees, Anuzis said, means that you don’t deserve to wear the Republican label.

Here’s a portion of  Lennox’s column:

“Walker’s rebuke of Sommerfield may have been inappropriate, but it needed to be said.

“While he has occasionally voted in ways that some conservatives find ideologically objectionable (particularly his vote for Medicaid expansion), he is hardly deserving of the despicable attacks levied upon him often for the entire three hours of Sommerfield and Bishop’s daily radio show.

“The issue at hand isn’t a struggle between Republican grandees and the party’s grassroots, though some want to cast that narrative.

“… Rather, it’s a tiny bunch of professional activists and thugs like Bishop, Sommerfield and Sedenquist, who are more comfortable as Democratic mercenaries than conservatives fighting the good fight.”