Milbank at the Post today has a tongue-in-cheek analysis of the Men Who Would be King at the RNC. Over at the Monthly, Steve Benen calls out the absurdity of these aspiring kingmakers resting their Internet cred on the number of Facebook friends they've managed to stockpile, but what really struck me was this passage in Dana's account over a different kind of stockpile:
The candidates were significantly more comfortable when asked how many guns they own. Duncan claimed four handguns and two rifles, Anuzis boasted of two, and Blackwell replied: "Seven---and I'm good." "In my closet at home," replied Saltsman, "I've got two 12-gauges, a 20-gauge, three handguns and a .30-06. And I'll take you on anytime, Ken."
Let that sink in for a moment. Here you have six grown men, affluent and college-educated, with career backgrounds in white collar professions; Ken Blackwell is the former Ohio secretary of state! It is likely safe to assume that these fellas all have homes in fairly cushy, reasonably safe neighborhoods deep in suburbia or even in the countryside. Yet here they were in a party forum, boasting of the kinds of personal munitions caches you'd expect from a resident of some lawless frontier town in Waziristan. Or, closer to home, an inner-city drug dealer protecting his stash.
My question is, who the hell are these people? They're political careerists with advanced degrees living in some of safest places on earth, yet they're collecting weapons like some Idaho survivalists who cut their teeth on the Turner Diaries. I have a hard time believing these dweebs really are avid hunters or trap shooters---and even so, Saltsman's handguns would get him laughed out of most serious hunt clubs I've heard of.
Of course, they could all be patently full of shit, too. But either way, it's a damning indicator of how militantly extreme the Republican party's national leadership has become that its leading lights feel the need to expound on who has the biggest guns as a means of impressing the rank-and-file, as if they were keynoters at an NRA confab.
Of course, there's another interpretation that could explain this, but I'll leave it to the psychoanalysts in our midst to provide the proper context.
---Vitelius
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