This is part two of a two-part article on what the Republicans say behind closed doors. Part one is Pima County Republicans Cheer Kelli Ward, who Jeers McSally
Speaking at this week’s Pima County Republican Meeting, candidate Marilyn Wiles promised “to do something about Tucson and what’s going on locally.”
“I want to take a real hard at local government overreach. Why don’t we have a commission to look at local governments across the state, particularly here in Pima County, to see what we can do to make sure that our taxpayer dollars go to what best serves us as taxpayers.”
She did not explain what overreach she was talking about. Wiles spoke at a packed meeting on May 15 at the Murphy-Wilmot Library in Tucson, to a crowd of 75 to 100 Republicans.
This office. No, that office!
At first, Wiles was running for Tucson’s CD2 congressional seat, but she abruptly changed her mind. She said she is now running for the state Legislature in District 10 (the East side of Tucson). “I will be running against Senator David Bradley. We need a very conservative person to get things done and get them right.”
She explained her fiscal policy this way: “I want a pot roast with potatoes, carrots and onions and beans and gravy. They put everything in one big blender and stirred it up, it no longer tastes like pot roast and carrots and potatoes. I want to maintain the integrity of the pot roast, you get money for carrots, we know we’re spending it on carrots. When we get money for potatoes, we’re spending it on potatoes.”
“You want transparency and accountability where our money goes. And not these surprises we seem to keep getting,” she said, without elaborating.
Education
“I am concerned about our education. We just passed pay raises for our teachers. And the next thing we hear it’s not going to our teachers. I want this pay raise to go to teachers, so it cannot be siphoned off to go to some other something somewhere else. Why do we pass legislation that says ‘thou shalt not spend it for anything but teacher salaries.’ And that can be done. And that’s why I want to go to the state Senate.”
A Republican in the audience said he has seen a lot of socialist and communist imagery in the RedForEd education movement. Miles answered:
“I’m appalled with what I’ve seen. We must stop educating our children under a liberal agenda. I am so tired of hearing we have to be so politically correct that we can’t teach our nation’s history the way it really happened. We need to get back to real reading, writing, an arithmetic. Common Core goes out the door. We need to teach our children the way we were taught. I saw on Facebook a picture of an older guy standing on a hill with his dog, saying ‘I want the kind of nation I grew up in.’ That’s what I want. I think our children are being cheated, they are not having the right upbringing.”
“I’m really old-fashioned and I raised my children to be just like me. I was very strict. One of my sons is 42 and the other is 36. They say to me now that ‘you were very strict with me and taught me the lessons of life I needed to learn.’ Now they’re upstanding men in the community.”
Guns, guns, guns
“I’m a big fan of the Second Amendment,” she said, adding that she has seven guns including a loaded shotgun under her bed, two loaded handguns in her nightstand and gun in her car.
“School isn’t like what it used to be. What’s the best way to protect students? Is it having armed people in our classroom? It may very well be. Perhaps it’s greater control by armed people outside of the school. If you’ve got a gun on campus, people aren’t going to mess with you.”
She said right after the 9/11 attack, she was in Washington, DC. “We got on an airplane and they gave us plastic knives and forks. If you sat in first class they gave you a wine glass. You can kill somebody with a ballpoint pen! It doesn’t matter what kind of weapon it is. We need to be protected.”
She called for judicial reform because a friend of hers had three different judges over six years in a divorce case. “It left him open for continued child support battles. Who does that benefit? Not the children,” she said.
Woman’s right to choose
“I do not believe in abortion at all,” she said to a loud round of applause. “I was raised in the First Baptist church. I went to Sunday morning worship, Sunday evening worship, I went to a prayer meeting on Sunday evening, and I went to every revival and tent revival in my whole life.”
She didn’t explain why she stopped running for Congress and started running for state Legislature, but she did say, “As I got to walking out there and listening to people, I can see we have big problems here in the state of Arizona. My expertise would be better served working with you (in the Legislature) right now. I need to clean up my own backyard first.”
I suspect that Marilyn Wiles changed her mind about running for the open CD2 House seat because as of 3-31-2018 she had only raised $9,020 with $5,461 cash on hand. You can’t run much of a campaign without any money.
Most of the candidates, both Democrats and Republicans, have not yet raised enough money to run a campaign.
https://www.opensecrets.org/races/summary?cycle=2018&id=AZ02
Wow. She’s running in Tucson with an extreme right win agenda like that? We don’t need another vote for fetal personhood in the Legislature.
Right wing, not right win…
It sounded to me like one right wing talking point after another, nothing original except maybe that stuff about the pot roast and carrots and potatoes. Sounds like she needs to stay home with her crock pot and as far away from the state legislature as possible.
With reference to Wiles’s statement on fiscal policy—I think her brain has been through a blender.