A stroll in the wasteland

Like a dud firecracker going poof in the desert, the candidates for lieutenant governor debated last week.

This was an event staged by the Arkansas Press Association to demonstrate the wasteland of Arkansas politics.

Several people of varying heights seeking to be lieutenant governor showed up because no one else ever pays any attention to them and they had nothing else to do. They seek a job that has no responsibility — it is called part-time, though it is no-time — other than to provide a holding pattern for politicians who couldn’t get elected to anything encompassing authority or responsibility.

I didn’t attend because, like Sarah Sanders skipping the governor’s debate, I found the whole thing beneath me. I write after reading various excellent media summaries because, with Ukraine and Little Rock gun crime in the news, readers need a break from things that matter.

It is true, I grant, that one of these people will sit idly a heartbeat from the governorship. But, with Sanders in that office, we’re talking six and a half-dozen.

The main thing that seems to have happened is that state Sen. Jason Rapert, aka Church Lady, the fiddle player and overwrought Christian who preaches a bit, said that Attorney General Leslie Rutledge — term-limited in that office and Sanders-limited at the gubernatorial level — needs to come clean on getting arrested 20 years ago for interfering with law enforcement.

That was the second-most interesting thing I’d ever heard about Rutledge, and I can’t say the first.

The charge was soon dismissed. Rutledge said Jason was just desperate for attention, which was not news, and that all that had happened, which was so silly, was that she was a passenger in a car that was stopped by police and, as a whiz-bang attorney of such note, she got out of the car to counsel the driver to answer the officer’s questions.

Apparently the officer preferred the driver not answer his questions.

There might be more to it, but the charge was soon dropped. And who cares?

Rapert also said that Rutledge and the whole lot of Republican hopefuls weren’t really pro-life because they didn’t back him when he tried to get the Legislature to pass that moot scheme from Texas to give people money if they thought they caught somebody getting an abortion and filed a lawsuit that prevailed. Even the Religious Extremist Council also known as the Arkansas Family Council said the bill was of arguable practicality because opponents of women’s rights to be more than birthing vessels are about to get the U.S. Supreme Court to approve a simple abortion ban from Mississippi. This would be the first time anything from Mississippi ever got upheld in federal court.

Rutledge defended herself by saying she was carrying a gun.

She also said she’d eliminate the state income tax, which also seems to mean she opposes the teaching of critical math theory.

A guy named Chris Bequette, related to and somehow even more extreme than Jake Bequette, said all the other Republican candidates were RINOs because they’ve been in public jobs and gone along with continuing to provide money for state government. He is against that.

Doyle Webb, another candidate, said, yeah, well, Bequette is a RINO, because … now follow Doyle closely on this scenario: Webb formerly was chairman of the state Republican Party, a role in which he needed a GOP candidate for attorney general, and he encouraged Bequette to be that, and Bequette had something else to do.

Are you getting the irony? Bequette is a wild right-wing extremist who thinks Rapert is liberal and all Webb could find to criticize about him was that one time a decade ago when he saved the state.

The real problem is that somebody would encourage a wild man to seek to become the state’s chief legal officer.

Webb boasted that he’d worked for years not as lieutenant governor, but as a staff aide to one, and was never once bored. He said that, unlike Rutledge, he really wanted the job.

It’s an interesting proposition — that, if the state Constitution requires that you maintain a boring office, we should elect a person to it who exclaims, “Elect me. I ain’t bored. I ain’t bored.”

There are other candidates. The surgeon general of the state offers to abandon the healing arts for the job. There is a libertarian. There is a pleasant, interesting woman who does TikTok or something. But she’s the Democrat, so she doesn’t count.

With all the action on the Republican side, Democrats might consider crossing over, as permitted by our open-primaries law, and voting for Bequette on the basis that he said he wouldn’t maintain any office or incur any expenses.

Then, if unfortunate circumstance should befall the governor, Bequette could ascend to that and shut it down too. John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.