This guy represents - William F. Buckley Jr. wherefore art thou! - the paranoid, know-nothing wing of the GOP, and mainline Republicans should be fed up.
Zach Dasher has two things going for him in his newly announced bid to become a congressman: state Sen. Neil Riser said today he won't try again for the Louisiana 5th Congressional seat that U.S. Rep. Vance McAllister shockingly trounced him for in a special election runoff last year (to replace Rep. Rodney Alexandar, who had resigned to become the Louisiana's secretary of veterans affairs, from which he has already resigned to take a lobbying job in Washington, D.C., because damn it whatever!), and he's cousin to all those Duck Dynasty poseurs, who will presumably do for him what they did for McAllister last year. You be the judge of which will be of bigger benefit to Dasher going forward.
I say Duck Dynasty poseurs because we've all now seen those not-too-old photographs of the Robertson boys, resplendently preppy with their frost-tipped hair in the let's-all-wear-white-because-it's-the-beach family photos. The beards and the scruff, the Bibles and Deep South family values - all show for a cable demographic that eats that stuff up. Similarly, McAllister ran on a God-fearing, family-values platform yet was revealed to be a philandering not-his-wife kisser. And Heath Peacock, his friend and (presumably soon-to-be ex) husband of not-his-wife, told media that McAllister's piety was all for show. Just a way to win votes and campaign contributions.
And now comes Dasher, first-cousin of Willie Robertson and company, who announced today that he will seek McAllister's seat in the election this fall. He has no prior political experience, which isn't of itself a problem. And yet he has mastered the terms of engagement for the new breed of insurgent Republican House candidate.
LA Politics' Jeremy Alford was provided with some of Dasher's utterances ahead of this morning's campaign announcement, and we can divine from them that Dasher is just what most of us - left and right of center but nonetheless occupying a broad center - have come to loath in the Tea Party Era (emphasis ours):
"It is time for ordinary citizens to get off of the sidelines and get involved in the political system. For too long, we've set idly by while Washington politicians slowly gain control over every aspect of our lives. I am seeking to represent the people of the 5th District in Congress so that I can effectively fight the big government intellectual elitists in Washington."
"We did not send people to Washington to determine our rights. We sent them there to defend our rights, but that's not what they're doing. They're taking them away, day by day. They're forcing us to purchase their healthcare insurance because they think they know better than we do when it comes to managing our private lives."
"There are many third and fourth generation farmers in the Fifth District. The EPA believes it knows how to run our farms better than local farmers. The federal government is trying to control every patch of farmland in Louisiana that has a ditch or a puddle. This nonsense must stop, and I'm going to lead the fight against it in Washington."
Wanna bet he's a young earth creationist who denies climate science - or at least claims to be?
Fifth Congressional District, you can do better than this.