Our favorite disgraced-local-teacher-turned-Santa-Claus-impersonator-turned-Congressman, the “mentally unbalanced” Kerry Bentivolio, finally made the big-time, scoring not only a feature story in yesterday’s New York Times, but a significant mention in columnists Maureen Dowd’s piece on the implosion of Republican party.
Apparently, when you come out right before the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech, demanding that our nation’s first black President be impeached for unspecified reasons, it’s something the national press finds newsworthy.
Here’s a clip from the New York Times article:
Representative Kerry Bentivolio, a freshman Republican from Michigan, has a legislative dream. It is not to balance the federal budget, or find a way to help his ailing state or even take away money from the federal health care program, a goal that has so animated many other Republicans this summer.
Rather, Mr. Bentivolio told constituents, it is to put in motion the impeachment of President Obama. “If I could write that bill and submit it, it would be a dream come true,” he said…
And here’s the video of said exchange between Bentivilio and his constitutents, which was shot recently at a meeting of the Birmingham Bloomfield Republican Club…. If you don’t have a lot of time to invest, I’d suggest jumping to the 27:45-mark, where you can hear Bentivolio say of our Commander-in-Chief, “I feel your pain, and I know. I stood 12 feet away from that guy and listened to him, and I couldn’t stand being there.”
Now, here’s a little of what Maureen Dowd had to say about the Congressman’s desire to impeach Obama.
…Bentivolio graciously conceded that he’d have to come up with some grounds first. “I went back to my office and I have had lawyers come in,” he said. “And these are lawyers, well — Ph.D.’s in history — I said, ‘Tell me how I can impeach the president of the United States. What evidence do you have?’ You’ve got to have the evidence.”
The Tea Party congressman, a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, hopes to find e-mails linking the White House to the I.R.S. examination of groups with a “Tea Party” label seeking tax-exempt status…
Bentivolio is the perfect avatar of the impeachment fever gripping a G.O.P. that’s unmoored from reality, given that he once admitted in a court deposition, “I have a problem figuring out which one I really am, Santa Claus or Kerry Bentivolio.” That’s why he sometimes used the pronoun “we.”
He’s been playing Santa Claus — as part of a business he started 19 years ago called Old Fashion Santa — with his own six reindeer. “To project authenticity, he’s even sought clearance from Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Mount Clemens to fly his sleigh in its airspace on Christmas Eve,” Kathleen Gray wrote in The Detroit Free Press.
He told National Review that he takes being called crazy as a compliment, so “it didn’t really bother me when people were saying, ‘That guy’s kooky because he has reindeer.’ No, they’re kooky because they don’t have ’em.”
Bentivolio also had a small role “in a low-budget independent film that seemed to suggest that 9/11 was an inside job,” the magazine said…
I like how he brought in PhDs in history who explained to him that, no, you couldn’t just impeach the President because you imagine him to be evil, but that you had to have actual “evidence”. I would have thought that would have been self-evident…
Good work, men and women of Michigan’s 11th congressional district. You had an opportunity to put Syed Taj, an intelligent, successful Canton doctor, in office, and instead you chose a Tea Party lunatic of the highest order.
I knew this day was inevitable… and that someday everyone in the country would come to know the name Kerry Bentivolio… but it doesn’t make it any easier to accept the fact that we’re now the laughingstock of the nation.
19 Comments
I’d like to give the people of the 11th the benefit of the doubt and say that they just voted Republican out of habit and didn’t know what this guy was all about. The alternative is unthinkable.
He’s got great ideas.
The Republican Party should already start working on figuring out how to include the impeachment proceedings into next year’s budget.
I think, with the slut shaming Santa behind the wheel, it just might work.
Perhaps I have too much faith in the Republican party, but I’ve got to think that they’re embarrassed by Bentivolio, who got into office due to incredibly odd circumstances, and will do everything in their power to unseat him during the next primary.
He’ll serve one term, and, because of it, the tax payers will have to give him a pension for the rest of his life and pay for his health care. If he’s really against big-government socialism, he should start there, and tell the American people that he won’t accept it.
We have no indication that he’ll serve only one term. I feel like people feel o logged to defend their crazies.
He embarrassed us before, though not quite so creepily, when he introduced the representative from “American Samolia” to Congress. http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/no-rep-bentivolio-american-somolia-is-not-a-place-20130617
You fucking anti-Christian Santa-haters make me sick. This man is a hero. We need more Santas in Congress, not fewer. I’ll go one step further. We need an Easter Buuny.
I’m not as likely to make fun of my friends in Minnesota about Michele Bachmann now.
Let’s wait until we unilaterally bomb Syria before starting the impeachment proceedings.
Michelle Bachman was really good at raising money.
Bentivolio probably wouldn’t be as effective.
It’s interesting that this idiot is getting so much support. I’m guessing that he will jump on some pot legalization platform for the next election like Ron Paul did.
Yah, more actors impersonating congressmen/women and destroying this country. YUCK!!!
You should interview Bentivolio for this site.
Is this site dead?
Bentivolio had no public town hall meetings this summer. All his events were private, like the one above. He would never do an interview for this site.
That’s the trouble with these uninformed crazies.
From today’s Macomb Daily.
Read more:
http://macombpolitics.blogspot.com/2013/09/mich-congressman-calls-for-probe-of.html
Republicanism is a mental illness. They prove it every day. You need to be a corrupt bast”d or be a complete moron with a low IQ to vote Republican.
Kerry and his deputy district attorney need to be seen for who they really are. They are alcoholics who drink together on a regular basis and have more of a personal relationship going on than meets the eye. His deputy district attorney has already received a drunk and disorderly charge where she has demeaned and sworn at officers, just to be on probation and have it dropped and off her record, when the general public wouldn’t have been able to get off so easily. Not to mention complaints of her incursion assaults to her previous boyfriend , that he never filed but has spoken about to close friends. Now she is the only reason Kerry is still campaigning and sources have mentioned her contacting someone on his behalf to get him thc. Are they conservatives, or just hypocrites. Passing on judgement is not the point in this article, but more of a question as to why others are getting prosecuted for drinking and driving and smoking weed, when our leaders who are here to help us are getting away with it.