What a rather bizarre way to get one’s message across! From the Huffington Post:
The race for the Arkansas’ third congressional district took a gruesome turn on Sunday, when the campaign manager for Democratic challenger Ken Aden came home and found his cat slaughtered with the word “liberal” painted on the corpse.
According to a press release sent out by the Aden campaign, “The family pet, an adult, mixed-breed Siamese cat, had one side of its head bashed in to the point the cat’s eyeball was barely hanging from its socket. The perpetrators scrawled ‘liberal’ across the cat’s body and left it on the doorstep of [Jacob] Burris’ house.”
Burris, Aden’s campaign manager, told The Huffington Post that it was his 5-year-old son who first saw the atrocity. He had taken his children out to fill the family car with gas before going to church, and the young boy was the first one out of the vehicle when they returned.
Burris has contacted the FBI and is further pursuing the matter with local law enforcement. The police officer who originally investigated the matter, according to Burris, said he wasn’t sure whether the cat’s killing could be construed as a threat. He was planning to file a report and said he would note that Burris was Aden’s campaign manager.
Burris, however, said he had no doubt that this incident was meant as a threat.
“Absolutely,” he told The Huffington Post. “There’s a pretty strong fringe here, but it’s never really been personal like this,” he added.
Aden, a veteran of the war in Iraq, said in a statement, “To kill a child’s pet is just unconscionable. As a former combat soldier, I’ve seen the best of humanity and the worst of humanity. Whoever did this is definitely part of the worst of humanity.”
Aden made clear that he did not believe Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) or anyone involved with his campaign were involved in the incident, and Beau Walker, Womack’s campaign manager, strongly condemned it.
“The thought of brutalizing any animal to make a political statement, no matter what that statement is, is beyond any standard of decency,” he told The Huffington Post. “The person or people, if there was more than one, who are responsible — they definitely need to be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. There should be no tolerance in our political discussion here in this nation for this kind of behavior.”
Aden is the only Democrat currently challenging Womack.
Wow.
Someone in Arkansas must not like Democrats or cats.
Rush Limbaugh would not approve. He’s a noted cat lover.
Sick, sadist bastard.
WTF IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?
sick, demented, twisted, disgusting…..there aren’t adequate words.
This is of a cloth w/ the Gabbie Giffords assassination attempt and is the kind of thing that occurs when politicos spew hate to stir up their constituencies. As I recall, Sarah Palin disavowed any responsibility for inspiring that particular attack. Hanks William’s Jr.’s recent diatribe against Obama is another example of this kind of irresponsible hate-mongering by figures in the public eye or those speaking out in public fora. There are a lot of unbalanced people out there, who hanging on these celebrities’ every pronouncement, are more than willing to act upon same.
Just recently just this kind of unthinking vitriol, again aimed at Obama, appeared in an editorial by Andrew Adler, owner-publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, as well as in an e-mail by Mike O’Neal, a KS Republican and House Speaker in the KS Legislature. Do these two men really think that they can write things like they did and not have whack-jobs who’ll try to act on their “empty threats”?
Voices for the extreme right (I’m thinking R. Limbaugh here among others) have been spewing out hate for “liberals” for many years now, and as our country continues its move to the right, that term encompasses more and more of us. Even the supposedly more balanced among the right-wingers have gone so far as to boo a decorated Marine, simply because he dared to come out of the closet and to question some of their platforms.
That cat had no political affiliation (nor did his 5-year old owner). In just the same way, the dogs owned by citizens of Nazi Germany were neither of the Jewish faith nor of “Aryan” parentage. Yet, laws were passed barring the breeding of dogs owned by Jews to dogs owned by non-Jews. Is the mind-set represented by this incident any different than that of the Nazis who enacted those laws? I think not.
This is why I encourage people in any and all camps to tone down the rhetoric, argue the issues but don’t resort to personal attacks and insults, and most certainly refrain from suggesting that an opponent is worthy of assassination. Aggression begets aggression– you can’t win someone over to your viewpoint by calling him a fool.
Right, left and middle, we are all Americans together. We may disagree, we may even be opponents, but we are not and must not be enemies. In the words of Benjamin Franklin: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. “
[…] Democratic campaign manager’s cat killed, corpse defaced with the word “LIBERAL” (retrieverman.wordpress.com) […]
[…] Democratic campaign manager’s cat killed, corpse defaced with the word “LIBERAL” (retrieverman.wordpress.com) […]
Very dirty thing to do.
…good look into the mind of a conservative republican.