Pity Sen. Phillip Wheeler: He keeps saying the wrong things about so many topics.

Perhaps a few words of faint praise for Senator Phillip Wheeler, R-Pikeville, who declined to resign his office at the suggestion of the political party he ran against. He said the wrong things. In one instance he was clumsy with a simile and made it look like he was comparing a certain race to a species of animal to which all of us are remarkably comparable. In the other, down in Sandy Hook, where Rocky was top pol, Sen. Wheeler made fun of somebody’s husband and you just don’t do that, even if there are two in the same marriage.

I have known Sen. Wheeler since he was young. He is descended from old line Republicans to whom politics long ago became a game of getting votes and not being overly burdened by principle. Those old Republicans, like Wheeler’s grandfather, would not recognize the current product of their vote-getting skills, and if they did, would posthumously gag.

Dealer Wheeler is not a racist: he just wants all the people who are to vote for him. He supports that voter I.D. law, not because it is going to be used to keep people poor or black or both from voting, but because somebody heard tell that years ago a guy may have voted illegally in Kentucky. That is a problem we must address.

And Sen. Wheeler certainly did not want to offend the LGBTQ community, wherever it is and even claims to know a gay person, an unlikely claim. No, he is not anti-gay. He just wants people who are to vote for him.

Senator Wheeler has nothing but high regard for women and that is the very reason he wants the Attorney General to be able to control their bodies by regulation which allows a doctor to perform an abortion only within 500 feet of the Mayo Clinic if he can prove he has cured a dog of cancer. The alternative for women is to quit getting pregnant.

So what compels a good, decent man who makes his living representing injured workers to take such outrageous positions and risk public ridicule? The answer is fear. Not primal fear, but primary fear, that the Commander or his toadys might run some even more idiotic right winger against you–a Big Mac attack?

So pity poor Republicans, who must run as rightward as they can and the whole time swear up and down to the voters that they will preserve and defend all those socialist programs the voters love like Medicare and Social Security. You run on the popularity of a party which, if empowered enough, would do away with all those programs in a heartbeat.

On the mouth thing, Sen. Wheeler, my Senator, you ought to try to think by the yard and speak by the inch and not vice versa.

Larry Webster is an attorney in Pikeville.

This story was originally published March 6, 2020 at 10:47 AM.