I'm almost 9,000 miles from My Old Kentucky Home, and I will never return.
A few years ago, Harvard University put out a study saying that Kentucky is the most corrupt state in the union. I smirked when I read that and said aloud, "In other news, water is wet." As a native son of Kentucky, I reserve the right to always criticize the state that took me 45 years to flee.
There really is something attractive about the smell of horse shit in the air and the rank corruption that permeates every single facet of what they call the "justice system" there. Christian theocrat Kim Davis refused a marriage license to a gay couple when she was the country clerk. The two men hired my father to sue her, and after she had climbed up on the cross to die a martyr, Mike "Hee-Haw" Huckabee came to Kentucky to raise her hand up in praise to the Almighty. Kim Davis looked towards heaven and raised her hand in a victory that her bigotry had been rewarded by Pastor Huckabee. After Davis got her proverbial ass kicked up, down, and all around in court, she and the State of Kentucky were forced to pay for their religious bigotry to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I have many such tales of villainous and naked corruption of people seeking office in Kentucky, but since today is Election Day, I want to focus on just the one, Daniel Cameron. The current governor, Andy Beshear, was the attorney general before he became governor, and his father was the governor as well. To be fair, I have criticism that can be laid at Andy's feet, and if you don't know what I am talking about, you can google the Kentucky State Police commissioner, and you can watch my father deposing the bastard on YouTube. In Andy's defense, he had to pick a good ol' boy commissioner, but this is about Daniel Cameron, who is a real threat not just to Kentucky, but to the nation.
The first time I heard about Daniel Cameron, it was from someone who went to law school with him, a fellow Louisvillian. It was shocking to me that he would recommend such a bastard, because I know Kentucky Republicans too well, but my associate assured me that he was a good man and that he should be supported. Well, this homey don't play dat. I do not ever support crooks, and all I needed to know was that he was supported by Mitch McConnell and was the protege McConnell hopes will replace him in the Senate.
Daniel Cameron is as crooked as any other Republican who has to have his pants screwed onto him every morning. Cameron is an aloof, unaware, oblivious, and obsequious Trump whore. He has proven to be wholly incompetent and entirely amoral, and he has the ethics of a honey badger on crack. There is no "there, there" to the man. There is a void between his ears which destroys knowledge and intelligence with the relative ease of a black hole destroying light.
Most Kentuckians will not remember when Barbara Whaley was "presenting" evidence before a grand jury after the murder of Breonna Taylor. Most prosecutors are very proud to state that their conviction rate is in the 90th percentile, but not Barbara. I was so certain of her certain failure to convict the reported serial rapist Brett Hankison that I congratulated her a month before the trial began at her losing another easily winnable case yet again.
Barbara Whaley works for the Attorney General's Office in Frankfort. She was given the duty to investigate the murder of Breonna Taylor, but what most Kentuckians do not know is that she was sent to "investigate" by Daniel Cameron. Anyone and everyone who knew Barbara knew that there would be no 'real' investigation. There was a big show of her making a presentation to a special grand jury, but this was likely all a show for an angry populace who wanted some accountability. Barbara Whaley didn't even ask for any indictments, and she likely had no intention of asking for any, either.
What Kentuckians also do not know is that the Fraternal Order of Police is singularly the most powerful political organization in Kentucky. They have a lot of members and money to donate to political candidates like Cameron, and they did. It's not their money, incidentally; it's your money.
You see, one of the scams that the Fraternal Order of Police in Kentucky run is the impound lots. The FOP endorsement is needed by any political candidate, and one of the biggest sources of revenues for the FOP is impound lots. Oh, you'd think that money goes to the state like it does in almost every other state, and you're wrong. All of the money raised by the impound lots goes to "the police retirement fund," which is already funded by the state. Speculation is that this is a separate fund that is run by the FOP for things like $5,000 dinners at popular steakhouses with Chateau Lafitte Rothschild on the menu at $500 a bottle or Dom Perignon. (I know, I've served them before.)
Daniel Cameron, who desperately wants to be governor and senator after his terms, is not and has no intention of alienating the second-largest voting blocks in Kentucky, with teachers being the first. Teachers just don't have a crooked union that's as bad as any mafia family Mario Puzo could write about. Barbara Whaley brought a single Wanton Endangerment charge against the alleged serial rapist Brett Hankison, for which he was acquitted, but since Hankison had multiple allegations of rape against him in his Internal Affairs file, when he went to the normal rubber-stamp arbitration hearing, thanks to the FOP's special clause with the city contract, his firing remained and was not overturned. Two of the other officers retired with full pension; one went to work in Carroll County, where he has already been in the news for a hit-and-run accident under "mysterious" circumstances where he might have been driving drunk.
One of the more important details in the Breonna Taylor case was that her former boyfriend had given her $10,000 in cash to hold for him. Nothing was ever said or spoken about the $10,000, but the attorney general sure did know about the allegations of the cops making some extra cash on the side by robbing drug money.
But again, Daniel Cameron is an ambitious man, and as I said before, he is entirely amoral. He is also a religious nutter who wants to impose the most draconian abortion bill nationally, which is why he steadfastly refused to say anything about it because he saw how that turned out in both Kansas and Ohio when religious nutters tried to pass a six-week ban.
Mitch McConnell knows how to get his protege to do what he wants, and he has. But Cameron is about as popular as syphilis in a cheap New Orleans whorehouse. There is little that could possibly defeat his naked ambition for higher office.
Truly, I do not say this with any sense of irony at all, Daniel Cameron would fornicate with a snake on live television while eating a barbecued baby if he thought it would get him a win of any kind. There simply aren't enough superlatives to convey in any language I am aware of that can convey what a scumbag Daniel Cameron is.
