Fresh off his spectacular "Hey, let's drag a random baby onto the floor of the House of Representatives to see what the cognitively undeveloped think about health care reform" display, here's Representative John Shadegg (R-Ariz.), on the House floor last night, giving New Yorkers his vote of no confidence and darkly warning about how all kinds of random New York City citizens -- from court clerks to the daughters of Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- are going to be kidnapped by terrorists if we follow through on our crazy plan to have functioning criminal justice system in America.
SHADEGG: We have to stand our ground. This is the time America, to say enough is enough. We are not going to expose America, American citizens, all those judges, all those clerks, all those bailiffs, all those jailers, all those police officers who have to transfer somebody...and it's easy for them to say, "Oh, we're tough." I saw the Mayor of New York said today, "We're tough. We can do it." Well, Mayor, how are you going to feel when it's your daughter that's kidnapped at school by a terrorist? How are you going to feel when it's some clerk -- some innocent clerk of the court -- whose daughter or son is kidnapped? Or the judge's wife, or the jailer's little brother or little sister? This is political correctness run amok.
[WATCH]
None of this makes any sense at all, unless what Shadegg is suggesting is that all the New Yorkers who currently participate in the criminal justice system, prosecuting dangerous defendants and fielding threats to their person on a daily basis, should abandon their "toughness" and just knuckle under to criminals in order to preserve their own well-being. Hearing this, I'm not sure why anyone in the world who takes Shadegg's insipidity to heart would ever want to provide testimony against a violent criminal defendant ever again.
Of course, I suspect that what Shadegg is trying to do here is mine a deeper, richer vein of stupidity, where you allow yourself to believe that by holding these detainees on island prisons indefinitely somehow shields the nation from the wrath of nihilist terrorists -- who can only access their magic kidnapping powers if we're stupid enough to hew to our tradition of American jurisprudence!
At any rate, with only his own actions and statements as a guide, I'd have to say that if Michael Bloomberg's daughter was kidnapped, he'd probably want the perpetrators caught and brought to justice. For my part, I sort of want John Shadegg to maybe shut up and stop suggesting innovative terror plots to our nation's enemies.
UPDATE: DCCC spokesman Ryan Rudominer has issued a statement in response:
"In case there's any doubt of the Republican Party being taken over by the likes of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann and other Right Wing extremists, last night Republican Rep. John Shadegg actually suggested that Mayor Bloomberg's daughter will be kidnapped by a terrorist...This is what happens when you have a Republican Party undeterred by their embarrassing loss in the NY-23 Special Election and desperate to win over the Right Wing fringe."
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