Scott Brown: Foot, Meet Mouth
Asked by Cavuto to comment on anti-government messages apparently left by Joseph Stack before his plane plowed into an Austin building with roughly 200 federal tax employees earlier in the day, Brown offered the usual platitudes. Then his mouth started racing faster than his brain and he veered into the weeds of weirdness. Here's the relevant snippet.
CAVUTO: We have a guy who is just ranting at the system, ranting at the IRS, ranting at big government, the need for health care, not the need for unions – I mean really crazy stuff. I would just be curious of your reaction to all that.
BROWN: Well it's certainly tragic and I feel for the families obviously that are being affected by it. And I don't know if it's related but I can just sense it's not only in my election but since being here in Washington people are frustrated. They want transparency. They want their elected officials to be accountable and open and, you know, talk about the things that are affecting their daily lives. So I am not sure if there is a connection. I certainly hope not, but we need to do things better.
CAVUTO: Um, you know, invariably, people are going to look at this type of incident Senator and say `Well that's where some of this populist rage gets you – um, isn't that a bit extreme?
BROWN: Well, yeah, of course it's extreme. You don't know anything about the individual. He could have had other issues, certainly. No one likes paying taxes obviously. But the way we are trying to deal with things and have been in the past, at least until I got here, is there is such a logjam in Washington and people want us to do better. They want us to help solve the problems that are affecting Americans in a very real way....
That's some mouthful. "No one likes paying taxes?" People are "frustrated" and "want transparency? Pardon my sarong but even in Washington there are limits to pandering. Come Friday, Brown's office might want to address the suggestion of a link between paying taxes and aberrant behavior. Like a lot of Americans, I get a little grumpy just before April 15, but come on.
In the meantime, let's posit that someone who purposely flies a plane into a building is quite unhinged. After reading Stack's suicide note you don't need to be a Sigmund Freud to realize that the man was battling demons.
(Here's the video clip.)