I am personally pissed off at Gilbert Baker. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a phoney, a sanctimonious poser with no real principles. Let me explain why I think so.

I am a State employee in Arkansas. The way pay is set up in State government here is like in the military: everyone within a given pay grade makes exactly the same as all others with an equilvalent amount of time in service.

The ultra-leftist, onetime campaign manager for an elected official in my department has been trying for years to get more money than a State Employee in her pay grade with her length of service is entitled to. She threatened the department with a discrimination suit, claiming that women employees are discrimiated against because her “computations” showed that the male employees, on average, were paid more.

She did not mention that this was because the two longest-serving employees, of which I am one, are both male. The next longest-serving employee is female. She makes exactly the same as us guys do. The department investigated, found that the pay system was nondiscriminatory, and obtained an opinion from the Arkansas Attorney General that declared that her claim was groundless.

A normal person would have stopped there. But this employee/campaign manager is instead a true equal-results leftist who knows how to play the victim game. Despite the Attorney General’s opinion, she somehow convinced our local State Senator to sponsor a call for a legislative investigation of this baseless claim of discrimination in the Arkansas legislature. The State Senator sponsoring the bogus investigation was Gilbert Baker.

This was personally irritating to me, as you can imagine – I don’t particularly enjoy being cast in the role of the recipient of unwarranted favoritism after spending over twenty years building up, step-by-step, to my current pay level. But my real concern was that the idiot State Senator who went along with this feminist charade was Gilbert Baker, the guy who had just announced his plans to run against Blanche Lincoln in 2010 for the U.S. Senate.

Because I was frustrated with Senator Lincoln’s lack of response to my many telephone calls and letters on issues ranging from TARP to Obamacare, I hoped that the State Republican Party would come up with a conservative candidate. It did not make me feel more confident to learn that Gilbert Baker had the most liberal voting record of any Republican in the Arkansas State Senate.

I wrote Gilbert Baker a letter expressing these concerns several weeks ago. To date, no response. I then wrote the State Republican Party, expressing my desire for a principled, conservative candidate and my increasing doubt that Gilbert Baker met those qualifications. Weeks later, no response from them, either.

I’ve had it with the Republican Party. I’ve been an active Tea Party participant, and I’m planning to go to the Tea Party Movement convention in February and see if we can find a conservative candidate for Lincoln’s Senate seat.

I’m afraid Glenn Beck is right, boys and girls. We’re on our own, and we better start taking care of each other. No one else is going to.

Venusian Visitor on November 25, 2009 at 3:32 PM