The Republican Freshman Class Is a Tribute to Our Nation’s Notorious Local Bozos – By Beth Mathis-Lilley (Slate) / Mar 11 2011
A guide to the GOP’s ascendant congressional wing of bullshitters, cranks, zealots, and personal-life disasters.
Every town, midsize city, or urban neighborhood has one, or, perhaps, a family of them: the nuisance litigants, the business owners who address zoning board hearings while visibly intoxicated, the parents who ruin PTA meetings by accusing The Polar Express of encouraging demonry. They are the regulars in the police blotter section of the newspaper, the ones who have been banned from multiple softball leagues for reasons that somehow involve child support. They are America’s local ding-dongs and loose cannons. And, increasingly, they represent the Republican Party’s interests in Congress.
The demands of politics have always made “popular” figures out of the kinds of people who the average voter would find off-putting in person, and Mr. Psycho Goes to Washington is not a wholly new story. Five-term Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar is apparently such a not-great guy to be around that six (!) of his siblings filmed campaign ads urging his constituents not to vote for him. (In February, Gosar was the featured speaker at a conference organized by a “white identity” fanatic who described the deadly Capitol riot as “awesome.”) It’s not a purely Republican phenomenon, either: onetime Democratic Florida Rep. Alan Grayson was known for both his caustic partisan rhetoric and tendency to appear in headlines like “Grayson Loses $18 Million in Fraud Scheme” and “Grayson Accuses Wife of Bigamy.” Going back further, there are figures like California Rep. John Schmitz, a 1970s Republican so extreme that he was removed from the John Birch Society’s “national council” because the group had gotten tired of dealing with the bad publicity generated, in the words of a 1982 UPI article, by his “statements against homosexuals and Jews.” Schmitz had two children out of wedlock with a woman who’d taken his college political science class and, with his actual wife, fathered ’90s tabloid character Mary Kay Letourneau.
Never before, though, have our nation’s area weirdos dominated one party’s media presence and priorities as they do now. With much of politics, and political fundraising, carried out through social media performance, the ability to get attention has become functionally identical to the ability to command influence, and a new herd of public figures has stampeded through the gap where the fence dividing fame from infamy used to stand. Many of them were personally inspired by Donald Trump, who got his own start as the notorious protagonist of bankruptcies and divorces in the New York City area. Area creeps are having their moment, and the Republican freshman congressional class is where they are having it. Here, a guide to its most prominently messy legislators.
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