It's got to be embarrassing for Marquette University Law School to have someone on staff who is so disconnected from reality.   The real question is, how did Rick Esenberg ever get on staff in the first place?

A few weeks ago, Esenberg penned a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel column equating my year 2000 vote for the pension plan to the genocidal massacre of Native Americans.  Imagine that.  I voted for a plan that staff informed me was something other than what it was, and apparently Esenberg thinks that's the same thing as the mass murder of Native Americans. 

Huh. 

Is this a guy who should be teaching young minds who are going to be arguing for truth and justice as attorneys once they graduate from Marquette?  What kind of logic connects a six year old vote to a genocidal mass murder?  Is this the type of person who should be teaching at a University?  I suppose if UW-Madison can have 9-11 conspiracy theorist Kevin Barrett, Marquette University Law School can have their Rick Esenberg, but shouldn't there be a higher standard for higher education?

But this part is really rich — not only has Esenberg managed to slide into a position at the law school, but he's also a regular community columnist at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.  That's right — the "liberal media" as Republicans like to call it, has given him a regular slot where he regularly writes and gets to publish his nonsense.   Hopefully they won't be affording the same regular column inches to Kevin Barrett.

Not only does Esenberg pen his right wing venom in Milwaukee's only daily, but he's also got a Republican apologist blog called Shark and Shepherd.  In his blog, he shot back at me again because I dared to respond to his over the top column in the Journal-Sentinel.  Here's what I said:

Journal Sentinel community columnist and Walker-apologist Rick Esenberg blamed former county leaders for today's problems ("Why the county's in this mess," July 5). He went so far as to suggest that bus routes that Walker has cut should be renamed the "Jim McGuigan Trail of Tears," an over-the-top allusion to the genocidal massacre of American Indians. The remark was racially insensitive.

Esenberg, apparently upset that the JS would dare let me challenge his goofball comment, responded in his blog:

The unrepentant Jim McGuigan takes to the editorial page to suggest, oh great furies, that I am a racist for suggesting that, maybe, his vote in favor of huge county pensions might have harmed the people who depend upon county programs.

Well I'm no Professor, but I did take logic in college and I'm not seeing how Esenberg was able to connect his racially insensitive comment with a vote I made 6 years ago.  I'll go further and say that my vote had nothing to do with why Esenberg is a racist if that's what he wants to call himself.  I stand by my position that it was racially insensitive to connect a genocidal massacre to a vote on a legislative body.

You'll also find this side tidbit to be interesting.  Esenberg says in his blog that he's from Milwaukee.  In his Journal-Sentinel columns it says he lives in Mequon.  So who is Esenberg lying to this time?  Is it his blog readers or the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel readers?