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It’s springtime for the Indiana GOP. And Germany.
An utterly charming story out of Indiana, via Chet Scoville at Shakesville:
U.S. Congressional candidate Tony Zirkle is facing criticism from one of his primary opponents, and a host of people on the Internet, for speaking at an event over the weekend that celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday.
Zirkle confirmed to The News-Dispatch on Monday he spoke Sunday in Chicago at a meeting of the Nationalist Socialist Workers Party, whose symbol is a swastika.
When asked if he was a Nazi or sympathized with Nazis or white supremacists, Zirkle replied he didn’t know enough about the group to either favor it or oppose it.
It’s fair to say that the photograph of Zirkle at Shakesville gives the lie to his claim. So too does just about all of the original story by Jason Miller of the News-Dispatch, which is well worth reading in its entirety. The money line:
At the event, Hitler’s birthday was observed with a cake with a photo of Hitler and the words “Seig Heil.”
As Marshal Sam Girard said in The Fugitive: Do you want to change your bullshit story, sir?
I hate Indiana Nazis. Also, Republicans venal enough to associate with them and dishonest/stupid enough to lie about it.
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Matt Blunt impersonates Karl Rove, lamely
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This story is beyond my ability to comment on.
Shared it with a colleague at work today and he said exactly the same thing.
Politics: queerer than it oughta be.
I guess he’s just actively courting the Nazi vote.
Perhaps it’s a larger demographic in Indiana than we know.
The joys of cultural inheritances! That colleague I mentioned - a gov docs librarian - told me that Indiana was a haven for the KKK back in the 20s. This graf I dug up certainly grabs one’s attention:
Leonard Moore from the University of California has carefully analyzed Klan membership documents of Indiana and discovered that 250,000 white men in Indiana (about 30% of the native-born Caucasian men in Indiana) joined the Klan in the early 1920s.
So yeah, the environment that fosters such strange reasonings hasn’t dissipated in Indiana. Not that Missouri is any better…
The KKK still limps along in my area. As part of the discussion on a play that we read, I ask students to talk about times when they felt in the minority. The answers are frequently poignant, scary, or downright funny. Sometimes the last part is due more to the teller than the tale. One of my students, it turns out, lives in MyTown, and went to the same h.s. as my kids did. She, a filipina, was talking about KKK activity there. She asked how they expected her to participate (this was after she had given up trying to explain that she wasn’t Japanese). Was she supposed to put on Geisha white-faced makeup and join in? (You kinda had to be there to enjoy her tale. Oh well.)
Tall Son butted up against this in high school, too. The local rednecks assumed he was one of them and let them in on their KKK plans to cause trouble for the “uppity you-know-whats” at the school. TS listened intently, got all the info…and then went to the principal. I knew nothing until it was all over, but apparently the trouble never happened and the KKK-ers never knew who ratted them out. The principal gave TS an award, but had to do it quietly since he couldn’t reveal why he was doing it.
TS demonstrates that his mom raised him right. Your children seem like fine people, Bitty.