Sean Duffy - the latest WisGOP pol to get his grift on

I figured there might be more to Sean Duffy’s resignation from Congress than just taking care of a kid that has health issues. But I didn’t think the former Real World character would be so quick to prove he was BSing.

CNN hires former GOP Rep. Sean Duffy https://t.co/w6VJACEe6J pic.twitter.com/G4uoueJfMJ

— The Hill (@thehill) October 21, 2019

And he's not coming in via satellite from Wausau, either.

CNN contributor Sean Duffy comes on to push the debunked Crowdstrike conspiracy theory for the second day in a row to justify Trump's actions

Alisyn Camerota: That's a conspiracy theory. ... Ukraine doesn't have the server, Sean." pic.twitter.com/Et0k0Zvohe

— courtney hagle (@CourtneyHagle) October 21, 2019

Who could have ever seen this coming?

It’s also worth mentioning that this area has lost the most people of any district in the state, so when redistricting happens after 2020, you can expect it to either get Dem cities like Eau Claire and/or Stevens Point, or look a lot different geographically than it does now. I’d wonder if that played into Duffy’s decision, as he can avoid a more difficult district in 2022 (if he’s not running statewide), and can pull the Paul Ryan “cash in and lay low” strategy for a couple of years.

I will give my thoughts and prayers to the Duffy family as they deal with the apparently difficult circumstances with their 9th (!) child, but I also expect these lifetime grifters to find themselves cashing in with some right-wing group sooner than later. I find the timing of Duffy’s announcement doubly intriguing given last week’s death of David Koch and Rachel Campos-Duffy’s gig as the spokeswoman for the Kochs’ LIBRE Initiative.

Add that in to the fact that Sean Duffy seemed to spend more time in 2019 campaigning for a job in TrumpWorld than actually giving a damn about the 715, and I’m going with Koch/Fox money as his likely next step. His surprise resignation doesn't add up, otherwise.

That was me, in this blog, on the day Sean Duffy announced he was going to resign. Close enough.


Duffy now joins Scott Walker and Paul Ryan in the “WisGOPs who leave office to cash in” club. How little pride would you have to have in order to buy into anything those grifters say or do these days?

Progressive author Eric Boehlert used Duffy’s hiring to note how CNN has become a frequent landing spot for mendacious right-wing grifters in the Trump Age. And even if grifters like Duffy are ridiculed for the crap they spew, it serves the RW agenda by muddying the waters and getting the poison into people’s heads.

CNN has hired many such Trump loyalists who have chewed up the cable news scenery, spreading lie after preposterous lie. That includes people like Jason Miller, Steve Kingston, Ed Martin, Jeffrey Lord, and Corey Lewandowski, among others. None of them, to be generous, covered the network in glory. Following the 2018 school massacre at Parkland High School in Florida, Kingston claimed on the air that students who rallied against gun violence were being taken advantage of by "left-wing gun control activists" led by billionaire George Soros.

It all badly muddies the waters, because by allowing—and paying—people like Duffy to disseminate nonsense like he's already spewed about DNC servers, CNN is legitimizing that lie, even when it’s fact-checked. "First of all, what you are stating is completely inaccurate and factually wrong," CNN contributor Jen Psaki told Duffy when he started in with the server conspiracy. "It's a conspiracy theory on the right-wing blogs." And frankly, that's where that garbage should stay.

By hiring someone like Duffy at this juncture, it appears CNN has learned very little since 2017, and specifically very little about how to cover a liar like Trump. It's not up to CNN and other media players to hire bad actors simply because the conservative movement is filled with bad actors. All news outlets ought to have easily identifiable standards, and if would-be paid contributors can't meet those standards, they should not be hired.

Keep in mind that CNN remains under constant bullying attacks from Trump and the entire conservative movement. Last year, the White House lashed out at CNN by pulling reporter Jim Acosta's press pass. Trump routinely defames the network on Twitter. And just last week, Trump's personal attorney sent a ridiculous threat to CNN, threatening to sue the network for its "biased" coverage of Trump. ("Never in the history of this country has a President been the subject of such a sustained barrage of unfair, unfounded, unethical and unlawful attacks by so-called ‘mainstream’ news, as the current situation,” etc.) Lawyers everywhere mocked the move as deeply unserious, but the cumulative effect adds up.

And that makes Duffy’s hiring even more distressing. It certainly seems to send a signal that 'working the refs' is an effective strategy, and that if Republicans complain loudly and long enough, the cable news channel will bend, in small ways, to the GOP's will.

Can’t figure out why CNN is a distant 3rd in the cable ratings with such “quality” programming and analysis, can you? That’s why I don’t watch a minute of that idiotic, weak network.

In addition, us in Wisconsin need to remember how Walker, Duffy and Ryan wanted nothing to do with the people of Wisconsin as soon as the voters stopped falling for their lines. And we need to remember every lie they said to condone and prop up this criminal Administration while cashing their dirty paychecks, and make them persona non grata if they even think of trying to trick state voters into letting them back into office after the stink of the Trump Era starts to wear off.