John Shadegg Uses Kidnapping to Scare Us, Yet He 'Kidnapped' Baby for Prop to Win BuzzFlash's GOP Hypocrite of the Week

John Shadegg

Many Republicans rose up to whine about the prospect of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed being tried in New York City. Of course, the United States has tried and convicted numerous terrorism suspects in this country with no problems, and Republicans such as Rudy Giuliani was for trying terrorism suspects on U.S. soil before he was against it.

But no Republican raised a stink with the flair of Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ).

"I saw the Mayor of New York said today, "We're tough. We can do it." Well, Mayor, how are you going to feel when it's your daughter that's kidnapped at school by a terrorist? How are you going to feel when it's some clerk -- some innocent clerk of the court -- whose daughter or son is kidnapped? Or the jailer's little brother or little sister? This is political correctness run amok."

Kidnapping, huh. Not killed or wounded, stabbed or beaten, but kidnapping. Why is Rep. Shadegg so intrigued about kidnapping?

Perhaps because Rep. Shadegg knows a thing or two about kidnapping. After all, Shadegg was the representative who kidnapped, er, "borrowed" Maddie, daughter of his chief of staff, to use as a prop to argue against health care reform.

In the charade that brought him fame, Shadegg was absolutely certain as to what Maddie thought.

"Maddie believes in patient choice health care," Shadegg said. "She asked to come here today to say she doesn’t want the government to take over health care, she wants to be able to keep her plan."

"Maddie wants patient choice. Maddie doesn't want her mom's premiums to go. She doesn't want her mom's taxes to go up by $730 billion dollars, do you Maddie? That's too much money."

But even though Maddie isn't his or somehow related to him, we are supposed to believe Shadegg knew what Maddie was thinking? And even at 7 months old, Maddie knows that her mother's taxes aren't going up $730 billion, which is more than Shadegg knows.

Clearly, Maddie didn't like being there; she might have even felt "kidnapped." So by Shadegg's logic, kidnapping is okay as a scare tactic to make a political point -- as long as it is his political point – but a form of kidnapping is okay to gain more political points.  

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) summed up the entirety of Shadegg's 15 minutes of fame, so far.

"It is one thing to bring a baby to the floor of Congress and use it as a prop in the health care debate and quite another to suggest that a family of the mayor of the City of New York might be in danger because they have a different political view about how to carry out justice."

The irony is that all of this could have been avoided if Shadegg has stuck to his guns and stayed retired from Congress. In February 2008, Rep. Shadegg announced that he would not run for re-election and not seek future political office. Shadegg un-retired 10 days later. The latter decision was clearly the mistake.

We shouldn't be surprised that Shadegg is this clueless. After all, his assessment of the health care situation this year would make you laugh, if you didn't think he was serious:

"Nobody goes without any health care whatsoever in America. Nobody in your listening audience right now drove past somebody on their way to work this morning who was dragging a broken leg down the street because it wasn't being treated. And this number of 47 or 44 million that are uninsured, those people are only uninsured for a short period during the year. Many of them choose to be uninsured because for them it's a logical and rational decision."

Logic? Rational thought? Those two pages are missing from the book that is John Shadegg. But his hypocritical stance on kidnapping does give him this week's GOP Hypocrite of the Week award.

Remember our motto: So many Republican hypocrites, so little time.

Catch up with you soon.

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This is John Shadegg's first GOP Hypocrite of the Week Award. Welcome to the club. You can see a list of all previous nominees here.

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