Yesss! We’re finally back to our ersatz Survivor season. We’ve endured months of chest pounding and breast beating on the beach, with the contestants attacking each other. Not much else to do, there’s no voting going on for another four months.

There has been plenty of spending, which requires donations. And plenty of polling, which the folks making those donations pay attention to. Yes, even the rich-as-pigs Koch brothers want assurance that the politicians they are purchasing are profitable investments.

First-to-go Rick Perry never caught on with the national public, or press. He was like a Survivor contestant who we’ve watched being a jerk during a previous season, and so we’re happy to see him go.

Scott Walker was the guy who looked so promising as a leader. You knew he’d go far into the contest. One season, just such a promising contestant leaned too far over the campfire, fell in and literally got burned off the show. They skipped Tribal Council for that episode. (He was shown in good health at the end of the season.)

What’s amusing are the ways that Walker burned himself, and keeps doing it. His primary season began a mere 70 days before he ended it, in first place. He dashed some high hopes quite unexpectedly, the story goes. A number of backers were taken by surprise despite his precipitous drop over those 70 days from first to darn near worst.

Some of them found out by means of the news—not even a phone call from the guy they gave thousand$ to. A real gentleman, Our Scott.

A casual reading of the polls made Walker’s downfall no surprise, for all but his diehard supporters. Of late, his only salvation was besting candidates such as Jim Gilmore and George Pataki, whose numbers never rose above the rounding error—or even got close to it.

Following the second debate, one wag characterized him as being a “repeat wallflower,” and he found himself tied with or behind notable rivals Bobby Jindal and Rick Santorum and Chris Christie and…

Hmmm, Walker might be on to something in “leading” his fellow candidates to the rear. In his speech, he said: “I encourage other Republican presidential candidates to consider doing the same so that the voters can focus on a limited number of candidates who can offer a positive, conservative alternative to the current front-runner.”

Truth be told, he threw himself into the fire repeatedly, most notably with his comparison of protesting Wisconsin teachers to ISIS. Or his proposal to build a fence on the Canadian border. He survived all that, plus tons of bad publicity in previous years, leading to a Gubernatorial recall. But he overcame that. His anti-union stance earned him financial support from the aforementioned Koch brothers.

His decline into irrelevance is our alert to the new reality: the Republican party is now much farther into right wing-nut territory. That’s been obvious for as long as Ted Cruz has ranked so high in the polls.

It’s truthiness—which is about what you want to be true—that has gotten traction so far in this campaign season. Walker may have accomplished things in Wisconsin, but he never projected competence or an assertive persona in his presidential campaign.

He didn’t have truthiness or falsiness. He had nothing.

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Written by

Steve Schlich is retired after 35 years of writing fiction about software: “easy to use,” “does what you want,” and the like. Hobbies include webmaster for www.RodSerling.com, writing songs and short stories. In 2004, he created www.NakedWashington.com, a website chronicling the naughty public art in Washington, D.C. He lives happily with his wife and cats, north of San Francisco.

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