Eric Greitens' Embarrassing Fantasies of Political Violence
There’s always been something a little pathetic with how Eric Greitens publicizes himself. After the Osama bin Laden raid, he went on cable show after cable show, hawking his memoir and explaining how SEALs like himself operate, but always forgetting to mention that he’d never actually served with a SEAL team in combat. Later, when he ran ads for Governor in Missouri, he again highlighted his SEAL background despite pushback from the SEAL community over how they felt he was misrepresenting himself. He succeeded in that campaign, only to lose the governorship amid allegations of blackmail, campaign finance violations, and felony invasion-of-privacy charges. But now that he’s running for Senate, he’s reached a sad nadir with his latest ad, in which he leads a gun-toting, camouflage-wearing team into a suburban house to go “RINO hunting,” in other words, hunting and killing Republicans who aren’t sufficiently hardline. You can even purchase a “RINO hunting permit” on his website for $25. Playing with advocating political violence is clearly an attempt to generate horrified backlash, and perhaps to distract from recent allegations from his ex-wife that Greitens abused her and their children.
But Greitens has a long history of successfully leveraging American attitudes toward the military in service of his own projects, first in the nonprofit world, and then in politics, and so what’s interesting about his recent campaigning is not what it says about him as a candidate, but about what he thinks his constituency wants from former Navy SEALs. And it isn’t defending American from foreign terrorists.
He’s also not alone. During the Senate campaign in Georgia, Texas House Representative Dan Crenshaw cut a much more expensively produced ad in the style of a Marvel movie where, after jumping from a helicopter, he lands on a car in Georgia filled with two members of Antifa and proceeds to attack them. The cringe inducing performance shared similar images of militarized politics and a hatred of domestic rivals (though this flirtation with violence didn’t help him when a group of far right protesters, shouting “Eyepatch McCain,” assaulted his campaign staff at Republican Party of Texas).
It’s a common enough thing, in the wake of failed wars, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, for people to look for internal enemies. “We were stabbed in the back” has been the rallying cry of so many disappointed veterans through the centuries. “This feeling pours out into a state of general indictment,” wrote German World War I veteran Ernst Junger in 1932, “into a literature of the blind, who are constantly in search of those responsible.” When things go awry in your country, you either have the fortitude to look in the mirror, or you hunt for scapegoats.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/eric-greitens-embarrassing-fantasies-of-political-violence/ar-AAYR4MA
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