Apparently, a guy who managed to become a well-regarded GOP Congressional candidate has an interesting hobby – he dresses up as a Waffen-SS officer and participates in WW II re-enactments.
Now I don’t know enough to judge his choice of character (I’m sure there are Redcoat re-enactors who don’t wish the Yankees lost the Revolutionary War). But I do know enough to wonder “what the hell was he thinking?” How in the wide, wide world of sports can someone get to a position where they are running for Congress and not think “Hmmm. Maybe I need to do a statement explaining why there are all these pictures of me dressed up as a SS officer.” Or that a political party is so clueless that they wouldn’t have an intern spend an hour doing Google-fu to check out candidates they were touting.
So the next time someone from Washington adopts a superior attitude, and suggests you should listen to them because of their superior wisdom – think about this.
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Maybe you should read the whole article. Althouse covered this the other day, relevant bit:
I was very far into the position of thinking man, this guy should not have been the candidate, what a screw-up for the Republicans when I got to this information — buried at the end of the 13th paragraph of the 15-paragraph article:
[Iott] added that he has participated in re-enactments as a Civil War Union infantryman, a World War I dough boy and World War II American infantryman and paratrooper.
Of course, even being a plumber, let alone a conservative woman, is a crime these days. Or at least some think so.
Maybe we’re defining another of the boundary rituals of the political (ruling) class: that they will self-censor who they are, and what they do throughout life, in order to grab that brass ring of elected office or senior bureaucrat status. Having sacrificed who they really are to the urge for power, are we then so surprised that once in office they turn out to be corrupt, hungry to expropriate more earned wealth, or willing to trample the freedom of the peasants? Perhaps it has a little to do with the palpable hunger (Palin anyone?) for ‘real people’ seeking office, warts and all. Is there a possibility that turning on the smear machine in this year will backfire, reminding voters which candidate didn’t spend his or her whole life planning to reach for political power?
Certainly no one who’s measured his life by the goal of attaining office would have been so politically incorrect as to be caught in a German uniform. And if he were reenacting a unit linked to atrocities like running death camps or participating in _Einsatzgruppen_ I would agree that he would be one sick puppy. But the bulk of the Waffen SS were fighting troops. In a bad cause to be sure, but the same might be said of the thousands of Confederate reenactors around the country. (And given there are existent photos of myself dressed up as a medieval warrior, and I’ve played the German side more than a few times in old-style WWII wargames, I’m not eager to chuck rocks.)
I _would_ be interested in knowing what else the guy’s done with his life, and what policies he promises to support if elected. For some reason I’ve become more interested in that than politically correct piety – or who gives the better press conference.
True Fascists do not stand for free elections: they cannot afford the risk of not being elected, they cannot bear public scrutiny or critics.
Sometimes the emotional load attached to old symbols is not well understood by the people wearing them. In other cases only a side is considered.
When I see a medieval market, a way of promoting natural and local products around here, I cannot help asking myself: _where are the stones?_
Again, as with Whitman below – the issue is that the guy wasn’t self-aware enough to understand that this might be an issue, and that he was pretty well blindsided when it became one.
Marc
What can I say, Marc, not everyone can think like a slime ball. But you are right, we need more slime balls, because slime balls get results and will screw the people. And if you are the screwee it’s your own damn fault for not being a slime ball.
I will say that from my own limited experience dealing with the media, _”maybe they won’t notice it”_ isn’t much of a contingency plan.
Here’s the thing with “communication as a key skill” — sometimes it’s not what it appears to be once in office. Perhaps, after such a massive misjudgment, one might consider being a little more cautious.
It sounds like a manufactured “controversy†to me. I read the candidate’s response on his website and it seemed appropriate to me – he pointed out that he’s into reenactment as a hobby, wore a variety of uniforms and then posted three on his website (including an adorable one with his little boy dressed as Union soldiers) and called on his opponent to join with him in denouncing these distortions and getting back to talking about the real issues.
Not a bad response IMO particularly for someone who isn’t a careerist and calculates their every move to advance up the political ladder. Speaking of which – I’d say that Richard Iott did a better job of handling this than our current President did about revelations about his “church†when he ran for President or the way he interjected himself into that Cambridge police incident.
I knew a handful of people that did this in college. They collected WW2 wardrobes and then would do reenactments, or come to Halloween parties dressed in either SS/or MP gear.
While the SS gear always gave me an icky feeling (frankly, I couldn’t burn that stuff fast enough), I came to understand that for some people it serves as a connection to history.
So, it’s a non-issue for me.
Marc – I assume that you’re now ready to write off Jerry Brown, since it seems that he and his staff don’t understand how a speaker phone and a voice mail system can interact – interestingly? You’d think that would be a rather trivial part of media – err, communications literacy in this day and age wouldn’t you? If he hasn’t figured it out in 72 years of life, he’s clearly outlived his self-by date.
Or maybe you should finally give up on the O, since he can’t seem to finally dismiss all those rumors about his birthplace or birth certificate? Of course that should be within his capability as a master communicator!
In the real world, the ‘birthers’ aren’t going to go away any more than the ‘troofers’ – they have an idee fixe goin’ on. Neither is Gloria Aldred, who seems to specialize in dubious October surprises for anyone daring to run for CA gov on the R line. And I’m sure we can count on the MSM to be even-handed with their ‘gotchas’ on the two parties. Aye-yup.
Oh, by the way, have you stopped beating your wife yet? (Sorry TG, but he deserves it.)
You’re setting up some sort of weird Survivor ritual for joining the political class, using the ability and willingness to kowtow to the MSM as a litmus test. You know more about the media than that. You know more about the issues than that. I hope you respect the Republic enough not to want to perpetuate a political class system. Give it up, it’s not worthy of you.
Communication certainly is a key skill. I’m not sure exactly how you explain this one, though. Most Congressional candidates have challenges finding enough money to get their basic message across, without having to add:
“Oh, hey, and listen… I have a passion for war re-enactments. Sometimes there just aren’t enough Nazis for the WWII re-enactments, so I’ve taken the bullet (so to speak!) and occasionally played the part, so that somebody else could be the hero. Just like when we were kids playing cowboys — somebody’s got to be the bank robber so that somebody else can be the sheriff in the white hat.”
OK, fair enough; but it’s kind of a distraction from the real point, which is that you had some sort of agenda you wanted to take to Washington. And now you’ve spent your campaign chest explaining that you’re not a Nazi, which your opponent loves that you have to deny. (“I’m not a witch.”)
We’re going to need 435 people who have never worked a serious job in their lives, each of whom must own a good blow-drier. They could be led by a spectacularly ignorant bulgy-eyed loon who makes Charles Manson look like a normal person.
So, we need to replace our insular elite politicians with people who have proven to be exactly the same? Maybe I’m just missing something, but I somehow am drawn to the definition of insanity….
AL, this is why it’s so hard to get good people to run for political office. If you haven’t spent every waking moment thinking about the political implications of every move you make, you’ll get eaten alive by your opponent’s “oppo research” team.
Do you doubt that this guy is a capable individual, other than his choice to wear a red-team uniform in a reenactment? Should we ban WWII reenactments since we can’t have “bad guys”?
Heck, I even saw a political idiot attempting to make an issue about someone playing Rommel in online war games.
If that’s the standard, maybe we really need an actual nobility, since citizen legislators can’t possibly live a life and survive the “vetting process”.
This re-enactment stuff always struck me as a particularly bizarre form of Drag, but hey, who hasn’t (once in a while)gone to work without latex panties under their suit.
The Nazi drag seems even more over the top and the organization talks about saluting the bravery of the Germans in that particular outfit.
That is where I have to part company. These guys were loyally serving a cabal of homicidal psychopaths, bought in fully to the master race theory. And so forth and so on.
Should it disqualify him from being a congressman? Absolutely, even the House should have some standards, the one that he fails on, which I would have thought to be impossible not to meet is stupidity. I am quite amazed that anyone would fail on those grounds, but this guy seems to surpass anyone I have ever heard of on the obliviousness scale.