CONSIDER THE SOURCE.

National Review's Noah Rothman asks, "Has Contrived Coarseness Jumped the Shark?"  He's had his fill of potty-mouthed Democrats.

I’ve been fighting a losing battle on this front for years. There comes a point at which any act gets stale, and the shtick loses its audience. Hopefully, the tactical deployment of profanity by our politicians is one of those phenomena that has reached the terminal phase.

In her bid for the U.S. Senate, Illinois Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton may have done the country a great service. Her debut campaign ad is so gratuitously obscene that it may push past its breaking point a trend in which politicians attempt to convey authenticity via the liberal use of four-letter words.

There's an open Senate seat in Illinois this year, with Dick Durbin taking his pension.  The lieutenant governor is one of the Democrats seeking the nomination (the party primary is St. Patrick's Day) and she asked a few of her friends to sound off.

They said it. We’re all thinking it. pic.twitter.com/AOARPLHGCB

— Juliana Stratton (@JulianaStratton) February 19, 2026

On former Twitter, she's being ratioed at least as far as former Miller Park, perhaps all the way to Lambeau Field.  She wraps her spot up noting she's from Chicago's South Side.  That's where generations of her constituent base have been rendered unemployable by Democrat policies.

More precisely, this is how ward-heeler politicians operate.  There's a symbiosis between desperate people who like having a ward-heeler "fighting for them" and a ward-heeler who mau-maus the rest of the polity about the continued parlous condition of his or her constituents.  A ward-heeler cannot call out the constituents for engaging in self-destructive behavior, nor get re-elected in a district in which constituents discover, or re-discover bourgeois habits. Better to have constituents rendered helpless by years of Democratic policies.

There has been enough outmigration of productive people from Illinois that the Democrat primary electorate residually comprises helpless constituents who want the public assistance to continue.