This summer everybody had a good laugh at the Democratic Party’s nomination of Alvin Greene to challenge Republican incumbent Jim DeMint for a U.S. Senate seat representing South Carolina. And we’re all still laughing now that he’s considering a run for president in 2012.
Earlier this year, the unemployed veteran won his party’s primary even though he had no organized campaign, had raised no money, and was facing misdemeanor and felony pornography charges for showing obscene photos to a University of South Carolina student.
Furthermore, his personality and behavior were bizarre to the extreme, prompting speculation that he suffered from mental defects — investigators eventually learned that he was honorably discharged from the military because his superiors could see that he was psychologically unfit to continue serving.
Along with Alvin Greene came a whole host of odd characters running in the 2010 midterms — Kesha Rogers, a Democratic U.S. House candidate in Texas who called for Obama’s impeachment, Basil Marceaux, a contender for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Tennessee whose platform included that “we all say Amen,” and even a candidate for state office in Wisconsin who sued the state to allow her to include the statement “NOT The White Man’s Bitch” under her name on the November ballot.
I won’t deny that these are some pretty oddball candidates, but let’s get real for a moment and acknowledge that the rest of the politicians that we consider “mainstream” and “normal” are the biggest freaks in this entire country.
Where to even begin? Rudy Giuliani in drag? Every politician who has ever cheated on his wife (which is a lot of politicians)? Every politician who has ever cheated on his wife in a bathroom stall with another man? Every politician who has ever cheated on his wife with an intern that ended up dead? I mean, Ted Kennedy let a girl drown and he’s not a bigger freak than Kesha Rogers? Or how about the fact that John Boehner will probably single-handedly close the federal budget deficit because of the Obamacare tax on tanning salons?
To even be a politician, to be willing to make decisions that so drastically affect and control so many people’s lives, requires a freakish level of megalomania that no well-adjusted person possesses.
Just what is so freakish or radical about Basil Marceaux’s position that you should not be required to get a permit to carry a gun? By definition, a right is something that you don’t need anyone’s permission to exercise. Otherwise, get comfortable living in a world with “free speech permits” and “free exercise of religion” permits so long as your speech and religion aren’t considered “dangerous” by whichever gang has the greatest political majority at the time.
And how is it that people are so outraged by Ieshuh Griffin’s campaign slogan announcing that she is “not the white man’s bitch?” It’s good to see that someone isn’t! A bit of raw anti-establishment fervor has never counted against a candidate in my book. The real freaks are the politicians who are the establishment’s — to use Griffin’s word — bitch. What’s outrageous are representatives that we send to be our voice in Washington and our state capitals, but who end up working for corporate and bureaucratic special interests.
Would Kesha Rogers have a better voting record than “mainstream” politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, John Boehner, and Lindsey Graham? Probably, yes. If her campaign was any indication, she would have voted against the TARP bailouts (which Boehner voted for), Obamacare (which Pelosi fought hard for), the Patriot Act (which Senator Obama voted to renew), the “stimulus” package, and every other large, unread, lobbyist-written, corporate-endorsed piece of garbage that came up for a vote.
During his campaign Alvin Greene seriously suggested that we could get the economy back on track by creating jobs for people to manufacture little action figures of him. We all laughed. It’s obvious that this would create no real value for the economy and simply create temporary, make-work jobs, funded with borrowed money that taxpayers would be on the hook for, doing more damage than good to the economy. But folks — that’s called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 that our “mainstream” politicians passed. A little bit less zany, but it’s the same crackpot idea.
It’s okay that journalists laugh at Alvin Greene’s strange antics. That doesn’t need to change. I mean, he is really, really weird. But the real tragedy is that those same journalists are taking the likes of Nancy Pelosi and that crying clown, John Boehner, seriously.
Wes Messamore is the editor in chief at HumbleLibertarian.com.