{"id":187938,"date":"2011-01-21T19:35:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-22T00:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/01\/21\/republicans-are-so-fing-classy\/"},"modified":"2011-01-21T19:35:00","modified_gmt":"2011-01-22T00:35:00","slug":"republicans-are-so-fing-classy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/01\/21\/republicans-are-so-fing-classy\/","title":{"rendered":"Republicans Are So  F%$#ing Classy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Wouldn&#8217;t you know it, &#8220;Jesse Kelly, the ex-Marine Tea Partyer who challenged Gabrielle Giffords,&#8221; is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/news\/gabrielle_giffords\/index.html?story=\/politics\/war_room\/2011\/01\/21\/giffords_jesse_kelly\">looking into the possibility of gearing up for a special election<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: blue;\"><p>Kelly, if you don&#8217;t already know, has been taking heat since Giffords&#8217; shooting for sponsoring a campaign event last year in which supporters joined him in shooting a &#8220;fully automatic  M-16.&#8221; &#8220;Get on target for November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office,&#8221; the event&#8217;s announcement read.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s true that the M-16 event had no direct connection with Giffords&#8217; shooting, and claims that it indirectly  helped create a &#8220;climate&#8221; conducive to the shooting are dubious at best. Still, to many people, Kelly is now best known as the guy who encouraged supporters to shoot M-16s in the name of defeating a member of Congress who was, several months later, nearly shot to death. Politically, the association is toxic, and Kelly faces a formidable &#8212; maybe impossible &#8212; task in repairing the damage.<\/p>\n<p>Thus, stories about him quietly looking into whether there might soon be a special election for Giffords&#8217; seat are particularly damaging for him. Sure, the inquiry his campaign apparently made wasn&#8217;t actually that unreasonable. There were, after all, reports earlier this week that Arizona state law requires that Giffords&#8217; seat be declared vacant if she&#8217;s incapacitated for more than 90 days. All Kelly may have done is make a discreet inquiry about whether this is true. (It isn&#8217;t; only the House itself can declare a seat vacant.) But, especially in the wake of the M-16 controversy, it looks terrible for Kelly to be seen making political calculations right now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Actually, it doesn&#8217;t look terrible.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s par for the course for the &#8216;Phants.&nbsp; It took them about 12 hours to politicize 911, after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wouldn&#8217;t you know it, &#8220;Jesse Kelly, the ex-Marine Tea Partyer who challenged Gabrielle Giffords,&#8221; is looking into the possibility of gearing up for a special election: Kelly, if you don&#8217;t already know, has been taking heat since Giffords&#8217; shooting for sponsoring a campaign event last year in which supporters joined him in shooting a &#8220;fully &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[998,1000,969,1055,982,1076,979],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress","category-elections","category-evil","category-gun-laws","category-stupid","category-terrorism","category-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187938"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187938\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}