Jones Nazi debacle symptomatic of the failure of the Illinois Republican Party

For forty years a whack-job, Art Jones, a neo Nazi, holocaust denier, and a white supremacist, has been a political gadfly, running for various offices in southeastern Wisconsin and the Chicago area. And on those occasions he survives ballot challenges, he performs about as well as Joseph Goebbels would in an 8 Mile style rap battle.

Is Jones evil? Mentally ill? A mixture of both?

Two years ago Jones was a Republican candidate for Congress in Illinois' 3rd district, but a petitions challenge by the state GOP knocked him off of the ballot. So that cleared the way for a bona fide Republican to face off against the incumbent, Democrat Dan Lipinski, for the House seat, right?

Wrong. There was not a GOP opponent against Lipinski in 2016.

Illinois congressional districts are a gerrymandered farce, an insult of democracy drawn by Michael Madigan, who lives in the district. Madigan, who is the chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party, has been speaker of the state House for 33 of the last 35 years. He'd be a walking-and-talking advertisement for term limits if he bothered to talk much. Illinois Republicans are understandably demoralized because so many of them are divided into bits in order to dilute their strength.

That little bulb in the northeast, consisting of parts of Chicago's Southwest Side and southwestern Cook County, is the heavily Democratic chunk of the 3rd, most of the rest of the contorted land mass is a Republican stronghold.

So this year did the Republicans recruit a candidate to oppose Jones--who is obviously persistent--in the GOP primary? Nope. Jones is running unopposed. He'll be the Republican nominee for Congress in the 3rd, barring a successful write-in challenge. The primary election is next month.

I get it. Whoever is the Democratic nominee--Lipinski has a primary opponent--is the odds-on favorite to win in November. But don't tell me that there isn't a scandal-free Republican retiree, for instance, who could run, and say the Dem nominee gets swallowed by an unforeseen scandal, drop everything to serve in Congress if the unthinkable happens. Those men and women are out there.

The Illinois Republican party has put a full court press against itself, believing that they are the Harlem Globetrotters' hapless foe, the Washington Generals. At the time Jones ran for his first office, the idea that Vermont would be one of the most Democratic states in the nation was laughable.

Winning is an attitude. So is losing.

Oh, those of you on the left who think that you can tie Jones to Donald Trump need to know that while he did vote for Trump, Jones has turned against the president because he has "surrounded himself with hordes of Jews including a Jew in his own family, that punk named Jared Kushner."

Jones is not only persistent  but he is consistent.

Oh, I hate Illinois Nazis.