Steve Stockman is an ultra-rightwing Republican congressman from Texas. As such he is in good company with other Texas congressmen (Louie Gohmert, Joe Barton and Lamar Smith for example) who have all been touched by the same spirit of insanity that makes them all say and do some really goofy things.
But what separates Stockman from his crazed brethren is the flavor of his actions: they ring of extreme, even virulent spite.
Where does spite come from? It isn't an evolutionary advantage from what I have found out because spite harms both the spiteful person and the one affected by spite. It is a lose-lose form of behavior. Another thing I have learned is that when one is spiteful, it is usually "all in." Spite is not dealt out in half measures but in ways to have as harmful of an effect as possible.
And Stockman is all of that.
Our first encounter with Stockman's spiteful behavior was last year at the President's State of the Union address where Stockman invited Ted Nugent to be his guest to sit in the gallery to hear the speech. Nugent was famous, just then, for his remark that if President Obama was re-elected he would "either be dead or in jail by this time next year." This was the one person in the nation who should not have been in the same room with the President, so out of spite, Stockman invited Nugent to do just that.
Our second encounter with Stockman's "uberspite" is his incredibly over-the-top offering of an assault rifle that could be won in a free drawing - the very same make and model assault rifle that was used to turn 20 children and 6 of their teachers into Swiss cheese the previous year. He even performed the drawing on July 4th for good measure to make sure that we all have the Sandy Hook massacre ground into our collective faces on America's birthday.
Our birthday.
And to continue in this vein, yesterday Stockman invited the racist Missouri rodeo clown mentioned here to come to Texas to perform. The person who portrayed President Obama as being a target for a charging bull has been banned from all rodeo performances in Missouri, but Stockman graciously threw out the welcome mat for this miscreant because "Texans value free speech."
Even when that free speech is racist to its core.
Well, I have to give it to Stockman on that one. The people who elected him and the audience that he is playing to in each and every one of his viciously spiteful stunts are probably very appreciative of Stockman and his hate-speech. Spitefulness, racism, and hatred are core elements of the TEA Party platform after all. And I am getting the idea that the new TX-36, which Stockman represents, was carved out specifically as a TEA bagger-safe district.
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