Hornendämmerung

Via AZCentral.

Sometimes you just look away for a second and they're gone! One of the blog's favorite conservative characters, Arizona attorney general Tom Horne, who just lost his primary yesterday, according to Ed Kilgore, and will presumably be passing at last through that semifinal revolving door to a consulting career:

Sunset and evening star,

      And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

      When I put out to sea...

Maybe that should be moaning at the bar, which there almost certainly won't be any of in Phoenix, but you get my drift.

Horne first came to our attention as the truly crappy Arizona state superintendent of education whose singular aim was to get rid of the Mexican-American Studies program in Tucson to make sure the town's Latino kids would not experience anything in the local public schools that would suggest they should feel proud of their ethnic identity, and who repeatedly argued that his plans could not possibly be qualified as racist because he'd personally witnessed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivering his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, although he was pretty clearly lying about that.

A little research revealed Horne to be a liar about quite a number of things, from a business bankruptcy in which he claimed not to have been involved through the personal life of the great Dolores Huerta to the utter failure of his time as education superintendent to doing anything positive about Arizona's schools. And then he turned up as attorney general, after the massacre of the children at Sandy Hook, advocating that every Arizona school should have a designated Barney Fife wandering the halls with his trigger finger at the ready, on the theory that the only thing that can stop a bad man with a gun is a dedicated amateur.

But I had no idea that in that same year 2012 Horne would be caught leaving the scene of an accident (fender-bender) on his way back to the office from a lunchtime quickie with a woman not his wife (she was in fact a girlfriend he had hired to a state job with a six-figure salary). Or that the folks who caught him would be the FBI agents investigating him for campaign finance violations. Or that even when the feds had dropped the investigation, the local authorities would feel there was evidence to carry on with that he used his staff inappropriately (not just banging them, I mean, but asking them to do his campaign work while they were on the state's dime, which is still more illegal, even in Arizona).

It all got to be a little too much for Governor Brewer, and Senators McCain and Flake, who unceremoniously ended up endorsing his Republican opponent, and now our little Tom is all grown up, with nowhere to go but out.

He's one of those guys like Senator Cruz who always looks as if he's about to burst into tears, and he's a talented pianist with cheap petit-bourgeois taste he shares with his idol, the famous philosopher Ayn Rand. Here's a little Rachmanimov, not bad at all, to take you out with, Tom!