Halloween is just around the corner, and hard on the heels of election day. ‘Tis the season for weirdness and, as Dr. Hunter S. Thompson famously said, “It never got weird enough for me.”
I don’t think the good doctor would have said that had he lived long enough to see Oral Eathorne endorse Rebecca “Checkgate Becky” Bextel for governor in 2026.
For sheer weirdness, this move will be hard to top.
If you don’t know who Frank Eathorne is, he’s the disgraced former chariman of the Wyoming Republican Party.
And he acquired the nickname “Oral” honestly.
This 2022 profile of him by WyoFile provides the explanation.
As all the kids in the Big Empty prepare to take to the streets dressed up like the undead to troll for candy, Oral Eathorne rises from the grave of political obscurity to troll for relevance by endorsing a non-Republican candidate for statewide office.
Oral was chairman of the state GOP when the party censured Natrona County State GOP Committee woman, Joann True, for donating her personal money to the Cowgirl Run Club, a bi-partisan PAC.
Eathorne and the bigwigs in the Central Committee viewed this as apostacy, if not treason, and their hair immeiately combusted.
Fast-forward to this election season, and Oral Eathorne – erstwhile leader of Wyoming’s Republicans – endorses not the GOP nominee, but the fringe candidate from the tiny Constitution Party who abandoned the GOP. How’s THAT for weird?
But wait, there’s more!
Bextel, Eathorne’s choice for governor is the same goofball who got caught handing out campaign checks like Halloween candy on the floor of the Wyoming House, and precipitated the Checkgate scandal and an ongoing criminal investigation.
Checkgate Becky came by her nickname honestly, just like Oral Eathorne.
It will be instructive to see if the state GOP censures Eathorne for his apostacy in stepping outside the “big tent” to endorse Bextel. But, nobody’s holding their breath for that eventuality.
Eathorne is largely responsible for the turmoil in today’s Wyoming GOP.
The intra-party fault lines began under his watch and he tolerated, if not encouraged, them.
The deep schism within the party that we see today is the direct result. And it’s Eathorne’s legacy.
Checkgate Becky will go home after trick-or-treasing on election night with an empty candy sack except for maybe a few kernels of Kandy Korn rattling in the bottom.
She will lose to the Republican nominee, Sen. Eric Barlow, BIGLY and everyone who can count knows that. None of her noisy cheerleaders are willing to bet real money that she’ll win.
Checkgate Becky is uniquely unqualified to hold Wyoming’s highest elective office.
Her public proclamation during an interview with Cowboy State Daily that she had started a prayer group aimed at a reporter she doesn’t like portends that she would govern by prayer circles and exorcisms.
Her claim to have bigger balls than our current governor suggests a troubling gender dysphoria.
Hunter Thompson notwithstanding, Wyoming has no use for that kind of weird.
But the Oral/Checkgate weirdness, writ large, speaks to a deeper and more serious dysfunction in Wyoming’s Republican Party.
A once-proud, powerful and effective political institution has reduced itself to cheap theatrics and parlor tricks, and is losing cohesion.
The center is not holding.
If current chairman Bryan Miller and the rest of the GOP hierarchy fail to deal with Eathorne, as well as several county parties that have supported the Constitution Party candidate rather than the Republican candidate, then hypocrisy will compound the weirdness.
If Oral Eathorne isn’t censured, like Joann True was, then party discipline within the Wyoming GOP will cease to have any meaning, and it’s hypocrisy will be shown to have no bounds.
Rod Miller can be reached at: RodsMillerWyo@yahoo.com
