Damn, as if it wasn’t bad enough that New Hampshire picked a monumental dipshit like O’Brien as Speaker of the House — apparently, they filled the rest of the place with equally unqualified, undignified and plain embarrassing cooks and weirdos while they were at it. Take Martin “Cranky Gramps” Harty, a 91-year old tea bag, who somehow finds himself elected but by his own admission entirely incapable of carrying out his responsibilities as an elected official. In a letter to the editor Mr. Harty declares:
So far I really don’t know what I’m doing. The whole process is so alien to anything else. A new Rep really needs a coach along with him at first but there is no room for anyone to sit with him, and no way they could holler at him in a committee meeting.Am learning the hard way. Little by little. I think that a few of the other first time reps must be in the same boat with me. We’re all sort of bluffing it out. The few votes I’ve made so far I really didn’t know what I was voting for or against. Just looked at the people around me and went along with them.
Now, that might all be sad enough: senile old fool gets in over his head, have pity on the old geezer. But. Martin recently explained to a constituent that what really troubles him is not his own abject incompetence, but rather:
“The world population has gotten too big and the world is being inherited by too many defective people […] I mean all the defective people, the drug addicts, mentally ill, the retarded — all of them. […] I believe if we had a Siberia we should send them to this and they would all freeze and die and we will be rid of them.”
And then it’s suddenly not so cute and cuddly any more. As a matter of fact, it’s downright scary to think that this deranged, decrepit old fart is in any position of power at all. He shouldn’t even be behind the wheel of a car, and yet there he is, trying to cast votes that affect the entire population of a state. Welcome to America: it’s like the Wild West and Disneyland rolled into one grotesque nightmare of larger-than-life delusion.
(h/t Talkingpointsmemo)
