Somewhere, if one believes in a deity and an afterlife, Thomas Jefferson was smiling the other day when his name was bounced about in a political campaign in Georgia.
Jefferson, who liked a good fight, found himself in a tug of war between Bob Barr, the former attack-dog Congressman, and Barry Loudermilk, a former state senator who touts himself a strict constitutionalist. The two are in a run-off to represent the heavily conservative 11th Congressional District northwest of Atlanta.
Jefferson, who was considered a Deist and called an atheist, is one of our favorite Founding Fathers because he is Mr. Independence Day, the main author of the Declaration of Independence. The fact that he was dashing, brilliant, sexually ambiguous and a man of many contradictions makes him even more attractive.
He has become malleable, an anything-you-want-him-to-be historical figure: a rebel, a patriot, a small-government guy, a liberty loving dude. He even co-founded the Democratic-Republican Party, which later morphed into the ancestor of the Democratic Party. So Jefferson can almost always be yours — as long as you stay away from the slave-owning thing and the fact that he was terrible with money and died a debtor.
For a couple years I have portrayed Thomas Jefferson in the Avondale Estates Fourth of July parade. That makes me sort of an expert because I have walked 1.3 miles wearing a cheap wig, a Colonial jacket, lace cuffs and white orthopedic stockings while waving to people as I march with my son’s Boy Scout troop. Plus, I’ve read the bestselling “John Adams” and have access to Google.
Loudermilk, a favorite of tea party types (to stay with the dudes-in-knickers theme), started the recent dust-up by comparing his lack of Washington experience (DC, that is, not General George) to the red-headed Virginian’s.
“Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, the document that changed the entire world,” Loudermilk told the Marietta Daily Journal. “He was the youngest, newest freshman in the Second Continental Congress, so I think it’s a good idea to bring in someone new.”
That statement irritated Barr, who is no man to trifle with. He was the House point man in the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton – William Jefferson Clinton. Barr likes to mention the Founding Fathers in articles he writes and speeches he gives, his business phone number ends -1776, and his website calls him one of "the founding fathers of the modern Republican Party in Georgia."
So, with all this in mind, Barr could not let Loudermilk, who also touts himself as a historian, keep going on so loose with the facts. Barr released a statement saying that his opponent calling Jefferson the “youngest, newest freshman in the Second Continental Congress goes beyond embellishment, to the point of butchering our American history for personal political gain.”
Barr’s camp says they were tired of Loudermilk going on about being all Jefferson-this and Jefferson-that on the campaign trail. They were simply calling him on his, ahem, “taurus excretus,” as Jefferson, a man of letters who spoke Latin, might have said.
Then, Barr added a little twist, tying Loudermilk to Saul Alinsky, the Chicago organizer who is the patron saint of liberal political activists and the author of “Rules for Radicals.” Barr said Loudermilk, like Alinsky, had a habit of “spinning historical references to support one’s argument regardless of the truth.”
Dan McLagan, Loudermilk’s spokesman, was not going to let Bob Barr turn a true American conservative like Barry Loudermilk into a community activist. (Shades of Barack Hussein Obama!)
McLagan, who in an earlier life was cheerfully known as Gov. Sonny Perdue’s hatchet man, said Barr sounds like a desperate Washington (the city, not the general) insider whose “track record sounds like Zamfir and his pan flute accompanying Borat singing Muskrat Love. Bob remembers Borat.”
The Borat reference, if you haven’t seen the movie, refers to the fictional character Borat (created by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen) who Punk’d all sorts of Americans, including Barr, into thinking he was a legit, but very weird, foreign filmmaker.
Borat offered Barr some cheese, which he started eating. The filmmaker then informed the former congressman – mid chew – that it was made from his wife’s breast milk. The video of the ever-proper Barr trying to remain dignified remains a side-splitting moment of crude humor, one McLagan could not pass up.
Again, Jefferson must have smiled. The guy loved landing a political low blow.
In the 1800 campaign, Jefferson’s campaign called President John Adams, his one-time friend, “a hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”
Not to be outdone, Adams’ camp called Jefferson “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.”
Burn!
Jefferson was also famously squishy on the religion issue, saying in a 1787 letter, “Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”
Imagine what the blogosphere and McLagan could have done with that one. They would have murdered Jefferson if he was running in the 11th District.
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