Better Call Saul? Maybe Not.

This started being a curated post, but frankly as things worked out I think it deserves to be rewritten from the ground up.

Back in 2010 there was this fella, Saul Anuzis. Saul had been a hotshot in the MI GOP for a few decades at this point, having held the state party chair among other prominent positions. He ran for national chair in 2009 and didn’t make it.

So he ran again for the 2011 chairmanship. Was considered quite the likely prospect when he started.

Along the way, he had the great misfortune to catch my attention while playing dirty pool.

After that, he wasn’t such a hot prospect anymore

Of course it would be silly to suggest that I was the reason for that.

It all started here (amazing good fortune for me to find that the thread is actually still on Facebook 13 years later almost to the day)…

What you’re looking at is Saul Anuzis sharing a fake tweet from a Twitter account that I frankly suspected at the time but could never prove Anuzis himself was operating. Certainly whether he was or not, he treated this obvious parody as legitimate and responded to it just as though it was really written by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Virg Bernero.

He even doubled down on it in the comments:

I took exception to this.

Transcript (too long for alt text):

Don’t we think our electoral process and government are quite screwed up enough, without injecting photoshopped lies into the equation?

Why not just photoshop Bernero’s head (or Obama’s, since that’s your ultimate target) into a picture and make it look like he’s peeing on the Bible, burning the flag, and r—ng a child [2023: redacted because I wouldn’t use this language in 2023, nor use the example at all, and I regret it…but I won’t deny I did it either, because I’m not a lying jerk -jh] and be done with it, if that’s the level of “integrity” that we’re bringing to the table?

I mean, if you’re just going to insult people by lying to them and assuming they’re stupid enough to believe what you say just on faith, why not go for the BIG lie?

As an ostensibly serious contender for the national chairmanship of the Republican Party, you should be aware that it is precisely this kind of childish and insulting behavior that keeps me resolved to never, ever trust a Republican. At least ONCE in a while I can find a Democrat who cares more about winning clean than about winning.

The Weekly World News had better ethics than this. Shame on you.

<insert lame “it was just a joke” defense, equally lame “I don’t get this internets stuff” defense, or a disappeared comment and personal ban here>

Of course some troll had to jump in with the usual stalking routine, poverty shaming (told y’all I’ve been broke for a while), dumb word plays on my then-current domain names…which just opened the door to further analysis of Mr. Anuzis’ egregious misrepresentation. I’ll trim the troll BS and stick to the substantive parts:

Further relevant trim from the back-and-forth with the troll:

And then – right on schedule, as predicted in the first comment, here comes Our Boy to make his excuses:

Sure enough, it’s the “I don’t get this internets stuff” defense, with an attempted twist at “well it sounds like him!” It doesn’t. At all.

So I called him out on that too.

Crappy writing with the unfinished thought in the first paragraph…but the point was made, and firmly. This is not a man who should be leading anything or anyone; he demonstrably lacks the character for it. Thanks to the troll’s suggestion that I “write it up on your silly little website,” I did exactly that. The bulk of that material is below, trimmed of minor and irrelevant padding.

This guy…wow.

It’s one thing to create a parody Twitter account, although I question the ethics of doing so if you are a leadership candidate for one party and the parody is of another party’s candidate.

I will also note here for the record that I have no evidence that Anuzis is in control of the Twitter account he supposedly is reporting on here…but it’s obviously not Democratic candidate for Michigan Governor Virg Bernero in control.

So sure, parody.  Fine.

Except Anuzis, as you can clearly see from the screenshot here, is deliberately playing this obvious fake as though it’s a legitimate public statement by Virg Bernero.

– JH in the original article

Now maybe if Mr. Anuzis was a college student pulling a prank or a young guy talking trash when he shouldn’t be, this would be a forgivable mistake.

However, Mr. Anuzis is a candidate to chair the Republican National Committee.  He’s not just trying to have a voice, he’s trying to be the voice of the Republican party.

And now he has demonstrated that his idea of ethics and integrity include treating an obviously fake public statement by an opponent as real.

This is precisely the problem with not just the Republican party but with most politicians in this country period, and the people that vote for them:  we don’t seem to care about principles and ideals anymore.  Rather, it’s about who can make the most LOLs.  Hur hur hur, you are so clever.

Maybe I’m at odds with the Republican party base on this – certainly your last successful presidential candidate would suggest that to be the case – but I’m not really interested in having a ham-handed giggling child in a position that includes the potential for him (or her) to influence public policy.  This is a position of national and world power, sir – tittering behind your hand like someone just made a wee-wee joke and you can’t help yourself is, at the very least, bad form.

This is to say nothing, of course, of the outrageous ethical lapse in even pretending to believe that the quoted passage was actually a public statement by Virg Bernero.

If this is what passes for “leadership” in the Republican Party, we may as well resign to becoming a one-party nation.

– JH, extract from original article

That was the end of the conversation, on October 12, 2010.

By October 15th, Mr. Anuzis was no longer being spoken of as a serious contender for the Republican Party chairmanship. Indeed, Mr. Anuzis has done nearly nothing of note in politics since. His only activity of any real prominence was being part of the bipartisan coalition to push Michigan to sign on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact…and he still holds no titled or publicly disclosed position of significance within the state or national party.

Oh, that vote for chair?

He placed dead last in the first four rounds of seven, only managing to make it to second of three with the help of cast-off votes for candidates who had withdrawn from the race…and the third-place candidate was a woman, so not terribly likely to win a Republican election for anything anyway.

Maybe I’ve heard some rumors that a certain candidate for RNC chair was told sometime around November first of 2010 that he was not going to win that seat because of certain past public indiscretions that may call into question his integrity, his affinity for the online campaign work that had become the top priority for anyone in electoral politics by 2010, and his perceived seriousness as a candidate, even if they had to bring in the current chair to split the vote and keep Anuzis out of any serious contention.

What is known for certain is that incumbent chair Michael Steele announced his candidacy for the position on December 13 – long after the other candidates – and then dropped out in the fifth round of voting. His votes were then distributed among the remaining candidates, with Anuzis receiving the second-least in round 5 of 7. He picked up 8 of Steele’s 28 votes; Preibus 9, Maria Cino 11, and Ann Wagner none. In the sixth round, Wagner lost 11 votes and Cino lost 6; of the 17 open votes Anuzis got five and Priebus 13…which means Anuzis also lost a vote to Priebus in that round, as that’s one more vote shifted than had been previously committed to candidates who dropped. In the final round, Cino lost 6 more votes and Ann Wagner dropped out, leaving 23 votes to distribute; Preibus picked up 17 of them.

Certainly it would be ridiculous for me to take credit for effectively ending the man’s political career. Anuzis blew it and displayed poor judgement at best and almost certainly poor ethics given the great likelihood he really knew the Bernero account was fake when he tried to put it over as legitimate.

Of course, poor ethics has never been a bar to Republican leadership…but a situation in which the party chair could reasonably be painted as a technologicially inept doofus was a weak spot the Republican Party simply wasn’t willing to risk.

Aside from a brief stint as a RNC national committee representative to fill a vacant seat, which was immediately lost to a Tea Party candidate in the following year, to this day (as of October 6, 2023) Anuzis has not held a single elective position within the Republican party, nor any appointments of significance. His only designated party position at all since that time was as senior advisor to Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, and we all know how that went.

(A final note: it never stops making me laugh that if you take all the vowels out of Reince Priebus, you end up with R–NC- PR–B-S.)