The Stellar GOP Field
by dday
Yes, they’ve come up with another fantastic list of candidates for the 2008 election, fresh off of such 2006 luminaries as Mistress Strangler Don Sherwood, Frequent Frat Party Guest John Sweeney, and of course, Maf54. So who’s stepping up to the plate this year?
First off, we’ve got Stormin’ Norman Coleman, our favorite Brooklyn-born Senator from Minnesota, whose campaign sent out a form letter to the editor criticizing his potential opponent, our favorite Minnesota-born New York-born, Minnesota-bred challenger Al Franken. Problem was, his supporters sent it to multiple newspapers without changing the text whatsoever, leading the campaign to have to apologize for astroturfing.
A new entry for the GOP, a rising star if you will, is former University of Missouri running back Brock Olivo, who is running in the 9th District in Missouri. And hey, he’s got some qualifications:
“Not only was I football player, but I also was in social studies class, and I have a passion for how this country works,” Olivo said.
I actually have more of a problem with “not only was I a football player,” as if that should be part of the reason to elect him, but you know, not the WHOLE THING.
And then there’s the potential candidate in South Dakota’s Senate race, whose story is so deranged that it takes a whole column in The Hill to explain it:
Folks often joke about the blood-sucking parasites that infect politics, but the gibes about politicians and lobbyists are usually just that — jokes. Yet the charge gets uncomfortably close to being literal when discussing former South Dakota lieutenant governor and potential Senate candidate Steve Kirby.
Following the sale of his prominent Sioux Falls family’s surety bond company, Kirby branched out into more exotic business terrain when he founded Bluestern Venture Capital in 1992. Among Bluestern’s portfolio companies was a Massachusetts-based biotech firm called Collagenesis — a company whose business model couldn’t have been more foreign to the stolid world of South Dakota surety bonding.
Collagenesis specialized in processing donated skin off cadavers into cosmetic surgery products, and was subject to a blistering five-part investigative series by the Orange County Register beginning on April 17, 2000. “Burn victims lie waiting in hospitals as nurses scour the country for skin to cover their wounds, even though skin is in plentiful supply for plastic surgeons,” read the lede of the Register report. “The skin they need to save their lives is being used instead for procedures that could wait: supporting bladders, erasing laugh lines and enlarging penises.”
Suffice it to say that penis enlargement represented a slight departure from the Kirby family’s traditional business of bonding hard-working Sioux Falls mason contractors.
That’s almost fictional, given its metaphorical possibilities: a Republican literally profiting off the skins of the dead.
These are the best and the brightest, people. And somehow John Boehner thinks it surprising that his comrades can’t get off their dead asses and raise money for this gang.
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