On this date in both 2015, as well as 2016, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, who was elected with next to no qualifications other than being the former deputy counsel of Mike Huckabee. Her e-mail correspondence leaked from when she last worked for the state of Arkansas, where she would share racist jokes, make sexual comments alluding to an attraction to underage minors (“If there’s grass on the field, play ball!”), make fun of domestic abuse victims, and so on. Rutledge chalks all that up to just being good old “country talk”, though. She also was caught committing voter fraud by simultaneously voting in multiple states, and one of her first actions while in office was to fire two dozen attorneys at the state’s attorney general office including fifteen attorneys, some of whom she attended law school with. Since taking office, Rutledge has failed in attempts to petition the Supreme Court to try and allow a ban on abortion at 12 weeks, or to reconsider their ruling in the Obergefell v. Hodges case, because she’s still Mike Huckabee’s pet project in many ways.
Our update on Leslie Rutledge mostly relates to the absurd lies and mistruths she told while trying to help Donald Trump get elected in 2016. It would have been one thing if her most grievous offense was how she attacked Hillary Clinton for not having an Arkansas accent during her four minute speech at the RNC (which isn’t really that shocking when you consider Clinton spent almost her entire youth in New York), but Rutledge had no limits to her partisan attacks during the build up to the saddest election outcome in American history.
The lowest moment, by far, would have been after the first presidential debate, when Hillary Clinton mentioned Donald Trump’s fat-shaming of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, and over the following days where Trump went even further and began spreading lies that Machado had a “sex tape” that everyone should “check out”. Well, Leslie Rutledge actually defended Donald Trump for his actions, and thought that she should paint not just a false equivalency, and not just blame Hillary Clinton for mentioning Alicia Machado (you see, it’s HER fault that Donald Trump had to insult Machado) but claim that what Hillary Clinton had done to women was “even worse”. She could provide no evidence to back this up other than one quote from a friend of Clinton’s from two decades earlier about Monica Lewinsky. She finished her interview by saying that Clinton “had never created a job” and was “insulting, sad, disgusting”. (This from Leslie Rutledge, who comes with a checkered resume of briefly held, low-level legal jobs including one for the state of Arkansas that her supervisor said she wasn’t qualified to be rehired.)
Just a reminder, Rutledge is terrible at her job, and up for re-election in about 20 months.