California Rep. Duncan Hunter has been a terrible human being for many years. He's running for re-election in his San Diego congressional district while facing five dozen indictments for spending donor-given campaign funds on himself, his wife, and a string of affairs. His actual actions in Congress have been predictably odious.
In a bid to save his behind in his hard-right Republican district, he's now eagerly going full racist trash, suggesting to voters that his opponent, the son of Palestinian and Latino parents, is a secret terrorist by virtue of his name.
“He changed his name from Ammar Yasser Najjar to Ammar Campa-Najjar,” Hunter said at a recent campaign event, according to NPR, “so he sounds Hispanic ... That is how hard, by the way, that the radical Muslims are trying to infiltrate the U.S. government.”
Not that it is any of the indicted trash bag's business, but Democratic opponent Campa-Najjar is Christian, he changed his name to honor his mother (not to trick the gubbermint), and he holds a federal security clearance due to his past position in the Obama administration. Duncan Hunter, in the meantime, is a serial affair-having, indicted campaign embezzler who inherited his identically-named father's congressional position in an act of grotesque, cynical nepotism.
The overtly racist Republican, however, isn't just muttering such things to private crowds. He's cutting campaign ads based on those attacks, as well:
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A scary-sounding ad from Hunter’s campaign also accused Campa-Najjar of trying to “infiltrate” Congress, noting that his grandfather, Yasser al-Najjar, participated in the deadly attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
What Hunter's white nationalist campaign team leaves out is that Campa-Najjar's grandfather died 15 years before Hunter's current opponent was even born; the two never even met each other in a dream. Duncan's campaign is suggesting that such acts must carry through via genes or osmosis, a common refrain in the worst racist circles but in few other places. If we want to talk about criminality and family ties, perhaps we need to take another look at what Duncan's father was up to during his own congressional years? Yes? No?
This is the point where election pundits are supposed to shake their heads and intone that Duncan Hunter's embrace of full-on racist talking points is evidence of "desperation" on the indicted congressperson's part. Don't buy it. Duncan Hunter the lesser has always been garbage, he has always acted like garbage, and he would be bleating the same grotesqueries if he was up 30 points in the polls or down 30 points. The man seems incapable of restraining his own inner impulses; he is a wiggling bag of self-gratification and bad decisions. Hopefully he will be in prison soon.
As for whether the Republicans of Hunter's San Diego district will embrace such rhetoric: To be sure, a great many will. His district has been a den of conservative racism for a very, very long time, fueled mostly by old, sunshine-seeking farts put out that their chosen paradise is somehow too close to the southern border for their tastes and nurturing the general sense of pasty entitlement common in every other racist nook of the country. I grew up in the place, so you can quote me on that one.
He's still an affair-having, campaign cash-embezzling crook, though.