At this point, the last man standing in Arizona’s eighth congressional district is a loser named Jesse Kelly. His victorious opponent, three term congresswoman and astronaut’s wife Gabby Giffords is in critical condition in a Tucson hospital. Like me, Jesse is a US government trained killer. Unlike me, he’s unconscionably proud of it. I hope the FBI is taking a close look at Jesse and his tea party combat seminars as they try to unravel the circumstances leading up to the assassination of U.S. District Judge John Roll, the mass murder of five bystanders and the mortal attack on the congresswoman. Here’s what Doug McEachern wrote about Jesse in the Arizona Republic a few months ago… (emphases added)
The Angriest Successful Primary Candidate I Ever Met is the GOP nominee.
Just as Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Giffords hoped, Jesse Kelly beat former state Sen. Jonathan Paton, the heavy favorite in the GOP primary.
I met Kelly in an Editorial Board meeting. Honorable fellow: war veteran, like all the district’s GOP candidates. Indeed, he was a Marine combat platoon leader, the most dangerous job on earth. He is an honest conservative. And a really, really angry guy.
When asked about priorities, he gave an answer that, while perfectly suitable for a former Marine officer, it seemed a bit over the top for a prospective member of Congress: “We’ve got to kill all members of radical Islam.”
And, when asked if he could work with Democrats in Congress: “I hope there’s no Democrats left in Congress when I get there.”
Look, I like shock theater, too. And I’ve been known to be a bit edgy at times. But Kelly is that rare conservative who takes politics so personally that he has morphed into his worst enemy. Like far-left liberals, he doesn’t believe his political opponents are merely wrong; they’re evil: “I think liberals are destroying the nation. We had better go fight them in Washington before they destroy our children’s future.”
No wonder Giffords is smiling these days. Kelly dissed candidates endorsed by Sarah Palin as people “who will sell our principles down the river.”
Kelly is such a loser that he was only able to take second (“worser”) place on Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World.” Of course it should be mentioned that Olbermann was suspended the day after this broadcast because he contributed to Congresswoman Giffords’ campaign. Ahh, ethics…
5 Comments
Sad day Frank. Very sad day. As usual, your instincts are right on target. Keep up the observations.
Look a few years down the road, Frank. Isn’t there a possibilty of permanent internecine political strife, ever-increasing numbers of massacres (10 or more killed), hotspots, no-go zones, area lockdowns, mass arrests, routine torture, dententions and increased secrecy and animosity among and within competing federal agencies? Might not there be a blurring of the police, national guard and military to the point where normal policing collapses and crime takes advantage of what escalates into a low-level civil warfare between amorphous groupings fueled by poverty, rage, and vested interests?
People – cured of their crippling fear as they become inured to violence and torture – will become desensitized and retributive justice will take hold across social strata, causing violence to spiral further. Eventually, when exhaustion sets in and a ‘settlement’ of sorts is reached, you have a nation suffering a PTSD from which, given the collapse of infrastructure, it takes generations – if it’s fortunate – to recover.
Are the U.S. military and jihadist think tanks not gaming just such scenarios – all the while planning, legislating and implementing ‘preemptive measures’ that merely reinforce the possibility of these sceanrios unfolding?
I’m just asking. We’ve seen this kind of thing happen before (in just about every country I can think of – but particularly in my own) and the States has been heading down that slippery slope a long time now. Exceptionalism is a natural-born thing, but so many Americans are behaving so out of touch it’s plain scary. One has merely to look at the past decade and the citizenry’s response to it. There was none (bar a few million good souls). That is weird in the first degree – something’s got to give or let go.
It’s a horrible possibility to ponder, but it’s worth looking at these worst-case scenarios. If we don’t, and plan to mitigate or neutralize them, we usually end up realizing them in the worst possible ways. Jesse Kelly is no loser. There are millions like him – be they in combat boots or piloting drones from air-conditioned rooms, now still able to vent their frustrations on the innocents of other nations. There are also millions of Jared Loughner wannabes, i.e. people driven out of their minds by the hypocrisy in which they’ve been waterboarded. These are today and tomorrow’s Americans.
The media and the pols might feign shock and horror, but they feel nothing. They know what they have to do.
My apologies for the countless misspellings above. I’ve spent the day with baboons. Literally. Just a follow-up on the above. What’s to stop the U.S. becoming another Mexico where such incidents [http://tinyurl.com/3xhtbel] are the norm?
Does the equation balance if we cancel their lunatics with our lunatics.
On the black board, certainly. In cage fights, no. Somebody emerges as the “victor” then.