Scott Walker Would Be Racially Transcendent Except For Those Meddling Racist Aides

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is one of those Republican thought leaders who's been saying that his party really needs to do a better job of reaching out to minority voters. That would probably be a lot easier if he didn't have to keep firing his own aides for saying racist stuff on the social media, like his campaign's deputy finance director Taylor Palmisano, who got canned Tuesday after the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found those charming tweets, which she'd sent in 2011:

"I will choke that illegal mex cleaning in the library. Stop banging (expletive) chairs around and turn off your Walkman," she posted on March 9, 2011.

Two months earlier, she went to Twitter to write about her bus trip from Pasadena, Calif., to Las Vegas after watching the Wisconsin Badgers play in the Rose Bowl: "This bus is my worst (expletive) nightmare Nobody speaks English & these ppl dont know how 2 control their kids #only3morehours #illegalaliens."

You can pretty much imagine people coming to her defense -- hey, 2011 was a long time ago, before Republicans even knew that they'd have to stop being racist in public! She was only 21 at the time, she's probably matured a whole bunch since then. Besides, why would Walker want to get rid of someone with the magical ability to tell whether the Mexes around her were illegal just by looking at them?

Palmisano is also the genius who sent out a weird -- but at least not racist -- fundraising letter that urged people to skip Black Friday shopping and do something really useful with their money, like throwing it at the Walker campaign:

"Instead of electronics or toys that will undoubtedly be outdated, broken, or lost by the next Holiday Season, help give your children the gift of a Wisconsin that we can all be proud of," Palmisano wrote in the one-page letter. It ends, "A strong Wisconsin is the best gift you can give."

For some reason, people ridiculed her for that, as if her entirely sensible pitch were part of the War on Christmas. That's silly! Only liberals do War On Christmas, after all. Which reminds us that instead of blowing your cash on booze that you'll just drink up or electronic devices that you'll just send embarrassing, career-ending Tweets on, you should give your money to Wonkette so we can get drunk and call Scott Walker something obscene on Facebook.

Turns out that Palmisano is the second Walker aide to get the boot for saying what they actually think on social media; in August, Walker canned Steven Kriser, the assistant deputy secretary for Wisconsin's Department of Transportation, after he made some helpful contributions to minority outreach on Facebook:

"You may see Jesus when you look at them," [Kreiser wrote] regarding illegal immigrants. "I see Satan."

Krieser wrote that a "stream of wretched criminals" is crossing the border without obstruction. These individuals, he said, "completely ruined" entire states and industries, breeding "the animus that many American citizens feel toward them."

You almost might get the impression that there are a lot of people in Republican politics who aren't entirely on board with the whole outreach thing. Surely, though, these are just isolated examples, and this is the last we'll hear of this sort of thing.

[ Journal Sentinel ]