ex-Rep. Trey Radel
It is the end of the year, and I have once again been tasked with compiling a list of all the most ridiculous (politically minded) things that happened in the last twelve months. To be honest, my heart isn't in it. Listening to many of our politicians talk is excruciating the first time around, and subjecting ourselves to it again
willingly seems like petty masochism. Last year we at least had Steve "Melon Calves" King as a highlight, and as far as I am concerned I could listen to that again once a week and never get tired of it, but this year seems a bit sparser.
So I've decided to mix things up a bit. Rather than merely compiling a list of all the most insulting, depressing and moronic political travesties of the last year, I've decided to winnow it down to simply the most travestical thing of each month. The one thing each month which was not just a stain on the nation, not just a mere political faux pas, but which was so egregiously bad or incompetent on the speaker's part that it could well be taken as a sign of the upcoming apocalypse. The Twelve Things, in specific, which likely signify that the very end of the world is nigh.
Ah, now that has a bit more potential. The advantage to a formulation like that is that, as any good would-be prognosticator can tell you, that has the potential for tremendous personal upside. If the end of the world does not come in the next year, no harm done, and nobody will remember—but if it does, ka-ching. All those that predicted it will become instant celebrities. We may all be suffocating in the toxic air, our hearing severely impaired from Space Leprosy or whatever similar fate is about to befall us, but at least the predictors of such things will get prominently promoted in future book tours. Also, books will be carved in clay tablets again. Signing each copy will take twenty minutes.
All right, now that we've been cheered up by the thought that maybe the world might end, let us look for the signs at hand. January. Hmm. There was news that actor Steven Seagal was contemplating a run for Arizona governor—no, too easy. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) shilling for the return of child labor? A possibility. Chris Christie's troubles? Mere everyday crookedness.
Oh, the guy on Duck Dynasty was invited to the State of the Union speech. That's gotta be worth something.
So what's our choice? The picture up top gives it away; go below the fold for the congratulatory speech.
In the end there seems an obvious choice. The year started with Rep. Trey Radel (R-FL) returning to the House after his post-cocaine-bust "rehabilitation." Note that I didn't say "resigned from the House," I said "returned to the House." He did his rehab stint, and sauntered back on in, reformed and remade. He presumed that both his party and his conservative voters would forgive him, and who's to blame him? Say you've made a mistake, say you found Jesus on your way to the rehab center and you're all set. That's been the politically expedient move for decades.
Radel would hang on to his seat for several more weeks, but it was not to last. By the end of the same month he had resigned, pushed out by colleagues who for some reason did not want to be associated with the Guy Caught Doing Cocaine While Being In Congress. But he gave it a good long try. He held on after his arrest last year. He held on after his arrest became public. He held on while he made the token going to rehab speech, and held on after he came back, all re-formed, and held on after it was announced that there would indeed be an ethics investigation. They had to pry him out of his office with crowbars.
That seems at least a little new, but just as importantly it helped punctuate a period of tremendous new chutzpah, to borrow a phrase, in which our political betters seemed to lose all sense of shame. Get caught making out with a staffer? Condemn whoever breached your privacy to film that. Your campaign staff gets caught living in an "office" that gets shut down by the fire marshall for being a deathtrap? Yeah, well, these things happen. Trey Radel returned to Congress because he honestly thought he could—he thought doing cocaine on the job was no longer necessarily a disqualifier. Had he been a bit better known or better liked, he might easily have been proven right.
So that's my call. January's sign that we are all very, very screwed, in a dramatic and existential and brimstoney way, is the congressman from pro-drug-test-everybody Florida playing the fire everyone else, but not me card. Oh, and he's a former conservative radio show host. You may want to get used to that phrase, if you haven't already, because we're going to be seeing a lot of it.