Louisiana Voice

LSU baseball has officially begun a defense of its national title but there’s another spectator sport that just had its opening day for Louisianans, so grab your popcorn, turn up the volume and make yourself comfortable for the next few months.

After all, first-rate collegiate baseball notwithstanding, there’s nothing more entertaining than watch the unfolding of a pissing contest between Repugnantcans when they compete with each other for elective office.

Of course, as we are well aware, once the votes are counted and a winner declared, they will close ranks, lock arms and act as though they’ve always been the best of friends. Until they aren’t.

In the meantime, though, it’s on between senatorial candidates Bill Cassidy, John Fleming and Julia Letlow and Gov. Jeff Landry who isn’t even running.

Cassidy, the incumbent, is tilting at windmills in an effort to hold on to his seat which, for all intents and purposes, he lost in 2021 when he cast a vote in favor of conviction in Cankle Ankles Trump’s Impeachment II trial. Never mind that he voted to confirm every single one of Trump’s nominations for U.S. Supreme Court and various cabinet positions. Trump is never one to forget a perceived slight and he makes it his personal goal to get his revenge. Thus, he has ENDORSED the candidacy of Rep. Julia Letlow in her challenge to Cassidy.

Okay, nothing spectacular there in the way of explosives. But then on Wednesday (Feb. 11), State Treasurer John Fleming, snubbed for Mar-A-Lardo’s endorsement, CLAIMED that Landry had been working for more than a year on some sort of scheme to assist with getting Trump’s endorsement of Letlow.

Squeaky Toy Landry lost no time in firing back, saying that anyone who would make up a story like that “may not be fit for office.”

Ouch!

Fleming had reason to feel he’d been spurned. He served as Deputy Chief of Staff during Trump’s first term so naturally, he sort-of, kinda felt like he might score the endorsement from POTUS (Pedophile of the United States).

But in Fleming’s paranoid mind, there was a method to his madness: Landry wanted Trump to support Letlow so that after she wins the Senate seat, she would subsequently resign and Landry would then appoint himself to succeed Cassidy but only after appointing Letlow to lead a college or university—“something she’s always wanted to do,” Fleming whined.

That’s not entirely out of the realm of the unreasonable. After all, Landry has already made appointments to the top jobs at five other universities—McNeese State, Southeastern Louisiana University, Louisiana Tech and LSU, some of which were considered controversial at best.

Fleming and Landry were all buddy-buddy in the past but a FRACTURE IN THEIR RELATIONSHIP began to appear over how to address Louisiana’s inordinately high auto insurance rates. And damnit, Fleming wanted that senate job and figured he was entitled to it—until the Trump/Landry tandem, real or imagined, became a factor

And Letlow? Yes, she’s definitely wanted to head up a state university and was a finalist for the job at the University of Louisiana Monroe before being passed over.

So far, she has kept as low a profile as a political candidate can but that doesn’t mean her opponent[s] will.

Take that attack ad by the political action committee that just happens to support Cassidy. No question about it, it constitutes dirty politics in that it does nothing to support the agenda of any other candidate but goes out of its way to attack the presumed leading candidate.

Writers in Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas and Florida, as well as The Donald his own self, have said at various times of primary races, “Republicans eat their own.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same—especially in Louisiana where politics is a spectator sport that rivals LSU football in its popularity.