When it was revealed that Tea Party candidate Rich Iott enjoys dressing up in a Nazi uniform, I wondered if the bigger character issue might be that he consistently lies about his military service. He’s been misleading voters for months.
Mr. Iott, who is running against incumbent Marcy Kaptur (D., Toledo), is a colonel in the Ohio Military Reserve, an unarmed, volunteer state militia that is authorized by the Ohio Adjutant General.The Monclova Township businessman often mentions his Ohio Military Reserve experience on the campaign trail and in mailings to prospective voters.
One glossy mailing portrays Mr. Iott in civilian and military garb and says, “Rich Iott understands the sacrifices our men and women in uniform have made because he serves himself.” Another one says, “Reservist Rich Iott will stand up and fight for our veterans.”
“He’s stretching it in terms of what the Ohio Military Reserve does. He’s giving the impression, I would suggest, that he is involved in matters related to national security and to state matters, and they are not. They are never consulted,” General Smith said. General Smith said it’s unlikely the governor ever will activate the reserve because of the cost of paying a lot of high-ranking reservists.
It’s probably too late to correct the record on Iott, but media might start looking at what is a consistent pattern and practice in the Tea Party: they lie all the time.
Sarah Palin, Sharon Angle, Rand Paul, Joe Miller, Christine O’Donnell, Ginny Thomas.
What do these people have in common, besides membership in the Tea Party?
There’s two weeks to go until the election and there are a whole roster of Tea Party candidates running for the House.
Considering the Tea Party record on honesty that has come to light re: their high-profile races and celebrity spokespeople, I suggest we might start looking at the House candidates.
mai naem
This moron is a true chickenhawk. What does he do in this so called reserve position? Harass Mexican looking people about whether they are here legally? Harass liberals on welfare about their countertops? Wait, maybe he goes around harassing the Joos who own all the media and banks?
El Cid
I had no idea that Ohio had an SS division.
Omnes Omnibus
You know what else isn’t in the Constitution? God.
Stan of the Sawgrass
Excellent point when it comes to this one, but is it a lie if you’re just too damn stupid to know what the truth is? (See Raese, John: bureaucrats vs. doctors in “pure social(ist)” Obamacare.) Etc., etc. etc., ad nauseam.
These morans suffer from an exaggerated sense of self-worth— “Hey, I’m God’s gift! I knows it, why don’t you?” Externalized self-delusion.
Also, too: a few years back, Factcheck.org pointed out that “there is no requirement that candidates tell the truth.”
JCT
How surprising.
Really, do these ridiculous figures *ever* tell the truth?
Every day gets more depressing — Maddow nailed it the other night. What the fuck is this country doing even considering electing such unqualified people?
It just isn’t a *game*, no matter how much they treat it like one. Check out the NYT this morning– clutching their pearls over the fact that the Republicans can’t name anything they want to cut. Hello?? Maybe if our “free press” could free up their minds and maybe, just maybe point out that the Republicans are completely disingenuous about “governing” they wouldn’t have to pull out the fainting couch 2 weeks before the election.
Great, starting out yet another day all pissed off.
Kryptik
Oh, naive Kay. Poor naive Kay. You’ve forgotten one of the cornerstones of modern American Political Journalism.
If a Republican stretches the truth, it’s ‘spin’ or simply ‘a different perspective’.
If a Democrat stretches the truth, it’s called ‘habitual lying’.
Of course they’re not going to investigate the compulsive lying of the Teabaggers. That just makes the teabaggers all the more genuine and Real ‘Merkan than those filthy goddamn hippie leftists like Harry Reid and Blanche Lincoln.
Omnes Omnibus
@El Cid: It also has caves.
Kay
@El Cid:
This part made me laugh, considering the Tea Party connection.
They’re a little, um, top heavy. Everyone’s a “leader”. Everyone’s “high-ranking”.
Media might have gotten a clue when the guy listed his occupation as “soldier” on a campaign finance form. But, they’re just now getting around to asking questions, now that the deceptive mailers have gone out to half a million people.
Played by the Tea Party. Again.
Ash Can
There’s no way these people can be truthful, because if they were they’d show themselves to be nowhere near as competent and well-intentioned as they’d need to be to get any votes at all. It’s self-preservation.
Scott
Well, a lot of the problem is that, yes, the teabaggers lie all the time… but the media thinks this is absolutely awesome. They’re in the process of making Unashamedly Dishonest Politician into the new normal for everyone. You can have a boring dumb librul politician who’s honest and works for you — or you can have an exciting crazy teabagger politician who’ll lie constantly and dress up like a Nazi and vote for hilarious new Constitutional amendments.
Kryptik
@Stan of the Sawgrass:
Just like there’s no legal responsibility of a news outlet to tell the truth.
The fact that this country either can’t tell the difference, or simply doesn’t care is one of those thoughts that keeps me in soul-crushing despair.
Michael
The man has more ribbons than a Bolivian admiral.
Emma
The “media” knows which side of their bread is buttered. They will never challenge a conservative candidate or politician about anything unless it is so outrageous that their own reputation would suffer… and since they don’t really have a reputation left to speak of….
Linda Featheringill
@Michael:
Cute.
Because I am an American, I had to look up a map of Bolivia to make sure it didn’t have a shoreline. But because I’m a DFH, I did look it up.
By the way, I have lived in Ohio for decades and have never heard of the military organization Iott so proudly serves.
El Cid
@Kay: I used to notice this all the time with the 1990s nutball militias: there were tons of high ranking officers, with nobody signing up to be an enlisted grunt.
It’s the same way that pretty much everyone who ever claims to have had past lives have had really exciting ones — famed warriors, princesses, priests, etc. I don’t recall hearing anyone claiming that their past life mainly consisted of cutting down wheat.
Omnes Omnibus
@El Cid: Between being Augustus and being Abelard, I was a guy named Ching who worked in the rice paddies, does that count?
Remember November
That’s like being in the CAP and saying you are Air Force Reserve.
Maybe he should dress up as Luftwaffe instead.
El Cid
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s why a little bittersweet chocolate and salt help a sweet rich dessert taste so much better.
Boudica
I hear complaints about the up and coming generation that they were constantly patted on the back and given trophies for just showing up. These tea partiers are my age or older (mid-40s) and they are all worse than millennials at living in a dream world where they are the center of the universe and their “reality” is the correct one. Are they lying or just voicing their distorted, self-centered views of reality?
El Cid
Does Ohio need to make mass purchases of Glenn Beck’s $200 survival kit to help people survive during the Obama FEMA camp roundup of Christians and non-elites.
PS: Of course, today’s grassroots democracy TeaTard movement has nothing whatsoever to do with the 1990s paranoid militia movements preparing survival against the FEMA camps to hold all the true Americans defying the Hillary Clinton soshullist UN-Russian invasion forces.
Tattoosydney
@Linda Featheringill:
Those pirates can get feisty on Lake Titicaca.
Linda Featheringill
@El Cid:
You’re talking to the wrong people. A lot of us had past lives that did not have fame or glory. Some of those lives were honorable, some not.
However, if you are talking to me, you only have to deal with the present life. And it isn’t filled with fame or glory, either.
:-)
Tony J
From dipping a toe in the oily coastal waters of Whitewingnuttia I can report that Iott hasn’t done a thing wrong with his (crooked) cross-dressing and this is all just a typical smear job by the Liberal Media.
Apparently Iott dresses up in a lot of different uniforms on his weekends, including – but not limited to – Union soldier from the Civil-War Era (so not racist) and WWI doughboy (so not pro-German), but the Lib-MSM don’t mention that, do then? No sir, they do not. And anyway, it’s a well-known fact that the Waffen-SS was purely a frontline combat force and (almost) everyone they killed was either a foreign soldier, a partisan terrorist or a Red Commisar, so what’s the problem? What’s next, huh? Are the Leftists going to start going after anyone who dresses as an Imperial Stormtrooper at a sci-fi convention? If not, why not? Are the billions of dead on Alderaan somehow less deserving of your outrage than a bunch of commies, eh? Just because they’re ‘fictional’? Typical libtard hypocricy! Etc, etc.
There is literally nothing a candidate from the Milky Tea Movement can say or do that these people will not defend, as long as somewhere, somehow, there’s a chance that a liberal is being slightly annoyed by it.
Egypt Steve
If the guy washes out of the Congressional race, he can always open up a fried chicken franchise.
Jason
Is anyone maintaining a running list of 2010 Republican Senate/House candidate absurdities?
Southern Beale
Oh good grief. Talk about divorced from reality! What is it about these idiots that prompts them to dress themselves up and pretend to be real military heroes? JOIN THE FUCKING ARMY if you’re so hot for it, idiots.
Ash Can
@Southern Beale: Iott says he tried to enlist, but was turned down because he had a heart murmur. What’ll you bet the “murmur” was a little farther up than his heart?
Southern Beale
@Ash Can:
Yeah I’m thinking there’s a screw loose there and it ain’t in his heart.
RSR
So basically, he’s running around playing Axis & Allies most of the time?
Bubblegum Tate
A functioning media would, which is to say that ours won’t. But still, it’s a pretty amazing thing: These teabaggers have built their entire campaigns on lies, but if you point that out to their supporters, that makes YOU the liar in their eyes.
Binzinerator
@El Cid:
Ditto with the Hutaree militia, as noticed here on B-J by DougJ.
I am curious though, what all those medals and ribbons mean. For service in a particular theater? Anyone here with real military experience recognize any of them?
Someone in the comments at the Toledo Blade said one of them is a paratrooper’s medal for jump school. Anyone know which one that was?
Even if they’re legit, I’d still like to know how someone in an outfit like the OMR earns those awards. Like, one for each time they send out an all-caps screeching paranoid chain e-mail?
edit for clairity but as it was sans coffee it was probably futile
Bella Q
@Bubblegum Tate: Although I think Joe Miller has in a sense done a bit of a service by being so out there as to have his
psycopathsecurity team detain a reporter for asking inconvenient questions. And then lie about why he had them there on Fux. He claimed it was a term of the schools rental contract, but the school district says no, we require that they have a plan and assign monitors. Which may motivate some of the press, seeing his outrageous lies, to look at the lies of some of the others. Junior Sparkle Pony Princess has already been shown to have, er, enhanced her entire educational background and may have election accounting irregularities.Then there’s Haley in SC, who claimed her departure from the hospital where she worked was amicable, except emails show it wasn’t. I’ve also never heard of this Ohio unit Iott alleges he’s in. So surely someone is going to see a pattern here, besides us.
honus
These cosplay patriots are the same people who wore band aids to make fun of a guy who had three Purple hearts and a Silver Star. And don’t tell me about how some of those were minimal, you have to do something more than be a reenactor to get that much hardware.
MoeLarryAndJesus
Speaking of victims and thugs, what happened to the open thread about the Yankees v. Rangers and my comment about front-running, heartless Yankee fans?
There was something along the lines of: What has 100,000 legs and no heart? A capacity crowd at Yankee Stadium!
Amanda in the South Bay
I think that, on paper at least, state defense forces to have a lot to offer. After all, with all the call ups of Guardsmen over the past decade, I’m sure states would like to have a back up force that can be utilized in an emergency and that can never be under federal control.
California has one, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Military_Reserve. I remember last summer taking the Capitol Corridor train to Sacramento, and seeing an Army colonel with “California” on his ACUs instead of “US Army.” Of course he had a 101st Airborne patch on his right shoulder, so he was a wee bit more of a real soldier than our Ohio colonel is.
In reality they are grossly underfunded, no one knows of them, they have few (if any) of the benefits of the real military, and people can apparently enter and become an officer without going through any real military commissioning program. And I’m sure there are plenty of wingnuts across the country in these kinds of programs.
And to be fair to state defense forces (well, at least in CA) they are a real military organization like the CA National Guard, not at all like CAP or the USCG Auxillary.
Mr Furious
Jesus. Fucking. Christ.
Everybody here remember the media shitstorm over Richard Blumenthal not actually misstating his service and the during/in Viet Nam-gate bullshit? Front fucking page of the NY Times for multiple days! He was practically run out of the race for that crap.
Yet this Teahole tries to pass off what is—by contrast—a weekend Laser Tag Club as active duty in Iraq.
MSM: Crickets.
Binzinerator
@Boudica:
It’s a result of the Boomer generation. As the largest and most affluent cohort ever in this society they have created and still do create their own reality.
If the Boomer generation could exert a gravitational force, it would be akin to a black hole, able to bend and warp the space-time fabric around it by its sheer mass.
Clinton and Bush are emblems of the boomer cohort at their pinnacle. I believe they also provide thumbnail sketches of the Boomer reality. What does it mean to have a president who actually argues the meaning of ‘is’? (Can you imagine Eisenhower doing that…or anyone of his generation?) What’s the meaning of a president from a New England blue-blooded family with an ability to fail upward who insisted he’s a regular guy from Texas?
It’s pretty incredible when I think about it. A ner’do’well party boy with a history of substance abuse and business failure wants to be the CEO president of a nation. Because he’s really a sincere, regular kind of guy you’d have a beer with. And most of the nation loved the gimmick.
The idea that one proffered reality is as good as another seems pretty damn post-modern to me. Arguing the meaning of ‘is’, a guy who fails upward into the presidency — these are PoMo put-ons, a through-the-looking-glass reality where things can mean whatever you want them to mean. It was as if the more outrageous the simulacra the more admired the stand-in became. Why care if it’s real as long as it’s a good story? Truth with a ‘T’ can be replaced by truthiness.
The reason the millennials are worse at living in a dream world than the Tea Bag generation is because they’ve never had, at every stage in their lives, the experience of having reality shaped to their whims by their sheer numbers or by their combined purchasing power.
Marketers loved the boomer generation. They had lots of disposable income and they were so damn easy to identify. The Millennials are not so easy to target but…if the boomers were a house party, Gen Y is finding the keg is empty, there’s vomit on the floor, half the girls have VD and the cops are at the door with a noise citation — and they’re the ones who are gonna get stuck with it.
Boomers for much of their lives due to their sheer numbers and income have created their own reality and when that reality turns out to be — uh, let’s see, what would the boomeresque word be? Ah! — suboptimal for a now-sizable chunk of them, the disenchanted ironically responded by again creating their own reality. And we get the Tea Party, complete with costumes, even. It’s really all they know how to do.
I really think part of the freak-out by the Tea Party demographic is because, for the first time in their collective experience, they are experiencing the novel emotion of not getting what they wanted. They’re facing losing control of shaping things. They’ve never had to live in other people’s worlds. And it is apparent a lot of them don’t know how.
Which reminds me. I knew a woman who was very smart, good looking, ambitious, capable, willing to work hard, and she used these talents and abilities to get to where she wanted to go. Schools, scholarships, awards, and later jobs, promotions, bonuses, social status. If she wanted something she could get it. Until she wanted to have a baby.
No matter how hard she tried it just wasn’t in her biology or genetics or whatever. She was unable to conceive.
And she had a major freakout, a meltdown, a period of unhingedness. Because all her life she could get and had gotten what she set her mind to. It had always been in her power to achieve her goals. It was only a question of will. Except now. And she freaked out.
[Edited in a failed attempt at brevity. Sorry.]
Keith G
The thing about Iott, is he graduated from high school in 1969 and as I recall there were many fantastic opportunities to experience the life of a soldier.
Kay, I grew up in Monclova, Ohio and as I recall we sent many young men on a little military experience. A few didn’t make it back.
What was young Rich doing then?
slag
I’m pretty sure the majority of the media considers this a feature, not a bug. It fits in beautifully with their Real World: Beltway Edition worldview. What’s a little resume padding between friends?