By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, June 21,
2024
From the Associated Press earlier
this week: “The House Ethics Committee on Tuesday gave an unusual public
update into its long-running investigation of Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.,
saying its review now includes whether Gaetz engaged in sexual misconduct and
illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts and sought to obstruct government
investigations of his conduct.”
Well.
His opponent in the upcoming Florida Republican primary,
however, has an even bigger scandal on his résumé: He recently accepted an
invitation to give a talk at the annual meeting of the Society of Human
Resource Managers of Greater St. Louis.
Angels and ministers of grace, defend us.
Gaetz’s opponent in the August 20 contest, Aaron Dimmock,
is one of the apparently endless supply of former naval aviators active in
Republican politics. Politically, he looks more than a little like Gaetz,
describing himself as a “pro-Trump conservative,” “pro-Trump” being the first political
qualifier in his social-media bio.
Personally, he seems to be … not very much like Gaetz. He’s been married for 28
years, has four children, has held a number of responsible executive positions,
had a long career in the military, holds graduate degrees from Georgetown and
the Naval War College, and, as far as the public record shows, has … never been
investigated
on “allegations that he was part of a scheme that led to the sex
trafficking of a 17-year-old girl,” part of a series of crimes for which
Gaetz’s buddy and former Florida tax collector Joel Greenberg has been
sentenced to 11 years in prison. Gaetz himself has not been charged with a
crime.
Gaetz’s campaign against Dimmock has been fairly dirty:
His gang (“Friends of Matt Gaetz”) has registered a bunch of dummy websites
such as “aarondimmockforcongress.com,”
which blares: “DEI Instructor & BLM Activist Aaron Dimmock is a
staunch supporter of making America woke!” So, it’s going to be that kind of a
campaign: Dimmock is going to be painted as one of those “woke” 20-year
military veterans and longtime Republican family men in northwestern Florida.
Sure. Various disreputable right-wing media outlets have
reported very selectively on Dimmock’s talk to the ladies and gentlemen in
St. Louis, the main claim being that he promised to introduce them to several
“radical concepts.” The Gaetz element even sent someone to the event to harass
Dimmock: Valentina Gomez, a
book-burning weirdo who videotaped herself as she shouted that Dimmock was
Kevin McCarthy’s “bitch.”
A fervent Christian, no doubt—and a candidate for secretary of state in
Missouri. The Gaetz element insists Dimmock is a cat’s-paw for the ousted
speaker, as though the fading memory of that leadership fight were the only
conceivable reason to oppose Gaetz.
The topic of Dimmock’s speech was “radical candor,” which
refers to one of those dumb business theory books that give an
important-sounding name to something banal and obvious, in this case the
usefulness of “feedback that’s kind, clear, specific, and sincere.” Clear,
specific, and sincere—the irony of that kind of thing being willfully
misrepresented by the likes of Gaetz and his supporters is one more example
of the
unsatirizeablility of contemporary Republican politics. And the kicker:
Dimmock’s other subject that day was Missouri’s GOP Gov. Mike Parsons’ “Leadership Academy,” a project to
develop better political leaders, of which Dimmock was the director.
Gaetz is basically a cartoon villain, but Dimmock says
this race is really all about military policy and constituent services. He says
that Florida’s 1st Congressional District has the largest concentration of
military (active duty, retired, and veterans) of any House district in the
country, and he faults Gaetz for failing to look after their interests, voting
against legislation that included a military pay increase and pushing the
federal government into a shutdown that caused hardships for military families.
Local voters, he says, “deserve a representative who understands the struggles
they’ve faced. Matt was willing to shut down the government and make thousands
go without pay for weeks or months on end just so that he could score cheap
political points. He voted against the largest pay raise for troops in 22
years.” And then there’s the fact that Gaetz is … Gaetz. “The district wants a
Trump Republican,” Dimmock says, “but one without scandal.”
There’s no publicly available polling, and Dimmock
doesn’t have any big endorsements to talk about, though he promises there’s
news coming on that front. Does he have a chance? Probably not.
And there you have it: That’s 700 words. Cut my check.
***
And that’s how you write your basic congressional
candidate profile. I can do this all day. Give me 20 minutes on the phone with
some dentist in Scarsdale who thinks he’s going to be the next Donald Trump
(I’d have written something like “the next Sam Rayburn,” but, come on, none of
these Navigator-driving suburban Republican jackwagons knows who Sam Rayburn
was, and would be terrified to say an admiring word about a Democrat even if
they did) and I will give you a column.
I’m not turning my nose up at that: There is—can be—real
value in such work, and there are people who do it really well here at The
Dispatch, at the Washington Post, at the New York Times, at
the Wall Street Journal.
But like our politics and political campaigns per
se, our political journalism has rules and parameters, conventions, lines
within which you are expected to stay. I suppose that if I were better at
that—if I could take the boredom—I’d probably have had a different kind of
career than the one I have had. But I get hung up on stuff, e.g., the idiotic
words “radical candor” coming out of the mouth of a sniveling little weasel who
is going to get stomped into goo by a beady-eyed, cosmically worthless,
evolution-missed-a-generation smegma smear of a subhuman being such as Matt
Gaetz and deserve it. It’s another little Battle of Stalingrad: It’s a
pity somebody has to win; all a decent person can do is pray for
casualties.
It is not lost on me that, if what Florida’s 1st
Congressional District wants is a “Trump Republican,” then Matt Gaetz is
exactly what the witch-doctor ordered. And so I asked Dimmock: “From a certain
point of view—and it is my point of view—what you’re doing is trying to beat
one dishonest, disreputable, dishonorable man so that you can go can do the
bidding of a different dishonest, disreputable, dishonorable man.” Yeah: Gaetz
is Gaetz—but Trump is Trump, too, and Dimmock insists he is a “Trump Republican.”
And how in the hell does a self-styled “Trump Republican” have it in him to
complain about anybody’s character: Matt Gaetz, Joe Biden, Pol Pot,
etc.
Oh, but Mr. Radical Candor has an answer for that!
“I think Donald Trump is being targeted by a politically
motivated prosecutor. And that’s the only comment I have on that.”
Well, all right, sure. No doubt Alvin Bragg is politically
motivated. That’s one reason why they elect prosecutors in lots of
places: to keep them politically motivated, which is another way of
saying democratically accountable. Democratic accountability is a virtue
with very narrow limits, to be sure, but it is a virtue.
But, come on. Trump did
the things, right? I pressed Dimmock on it: It’s not like Bragg was
making up the stuff about Trump’s turning the possible promise of a spot on The
Apprentice into an opportunity to give a particularly gamey pornographic
actress a
sad little poke in the whiskers in a Tahoe hotel room or paying the hush
money or lying about it in business records.
Maybe you don’t think that should be a crime, and maybe
you think nobody would get charged in those circumstances if he weren’t Donald
Trump. Fair enough. But Trump did all the stuff. It’s not like Alvin
Bragg was there holding Trump’s dick with a pair of tweezers and a big
brilliant entrapment scheme. Trump has betrayed every wife he’s ever had and
just about everybody who’s ever been stupid enough to lend him money or front
him services on credit. I asked Dimmock if he thought the Stormy Daniels stuff
was made up, if he’d be proud of himself if he had treated his wife the way
Trump treated any of his.
“I think Donald Trump is being targeted by a politically
motivated prosecutor. And that’s the only comment I have on that.”
Radical candor. Sure, yeah.
I don’t suppose you meet a lot of naval aviators who are
cowards, but, if you’re looking for a specimen, Aaron Dimmock is your guy.
He’ll strut around calling himself a patriot and talking up his military
credentials—and he must have called himself “an operator” at least three times
in our short conversation—but what’s he really doing? He’s a retired military
guy looking to pump up his HR-consulting gig. I’m sure he’d love to be in the
House. I’m sure he detests Matt Gaetz almost as much as Matt Gaetz deserves to
be detested. But let’s have some radical candor about what’s really going on,
here: Dimmock is a bored military retiree looking for his next job. And while
he apparently has guts enough to fly on military missions of various
descriptions, he isn’t packing the testicular gear to say whether banging a
porn star while your wife is at home nursing the newborn is an admirable
quality in a guy who wants to be the so-called Leader of the so-called Free
World.
Radical candor. All right. Let’s have some.
It is going to be impossible for me to feel very sorry
for a guy who describes himself—first thing!—as “pro-Trump” when he gets done
in by Trump-style lying, bulls–t, and low-lifery. You buy the ticket, you take
the ride. At least Matt Gaetz knows what he is: He’s a parasite, and happy to
be one. He’s thrilled to be a leech on the body politic—a round little tick on
the big American national scrotum that is the Florida panhandle—until the host
organism either dies or somehow works up the self-respect to flick him
off. Absent that, he’ll remain a bloodsucker pumping the political
equivalent of Lyme disease into the political bloodstream.
And here’s Aaron Dimmock, taking a bold stand against the
black-legged deer tick injecting the political version of Lyme Disease into the
national bloodstream while proudly flying the banner of Haementeria
ghilianii, declaring for Team Amazon Giant Leech. This is what being an
anti-Gaetz, pro-Trump guy is: One more crudely imagined freak in the Chalmun’s
Spaceport Cantina that is the God-forsaken Republican Party in Anno Domini
2024.
But I’m a Professional Journalist™ who isn’t supposed to
have these thoughts—or who at least isn’t supposed to put them into digital
print. I’m supposed to write about polls and endorsements and how Florida’s 1st
Congressional District is
R+19. You know: the stuff you expect from a media sophisticate,
a genuine man of the press. This is one of those things you write and maybe
show to your wife or a buddy and then delete. I’m picturing my poor editors
clutching their heads right now and saying things that even I might hesitate to
put into digital print.
But we could really use some damn radical candor. Because
we are governed by imbeciles and thieves and miscreants and degenerates and
people who are willing to put up with all that imbecility and thievery and
miscreance and degeneracy if it gets them even such a pathetic prize as a
temporary seat in the U.S. House of Representatives serving on behalf of the
lovely folks who have freely chosen Matt Gaetz, of all bipedal things, as their
man in Washington. I don’t know that my own personal soul is worth all that
much, but I’d expect more than that in trade.
And so here endeth the candidate profile. Good luck,
Aaron Dimmock, “radical candor coach”—coach!—and gormless Trump
sycophant. You’re going to lose—for nothing. I may not have a
gigantic readership, but this probably will be the most-read thing ever written
about you, and it would have been better if you could have worked up the
manhood to say what you and I both know to be obviously—and I mean
illuminated-by-Klieg-lights obviously—true. It isn’t easy ending up the
weasel in a story in which Matt Gaetz figures prominently.
Over at the Washington Post—where a few reporters
are trying
to sandbag the new publisher for having the audacity to point out that
their work sucks and has sucked pretty hard since 50 years ago when Americans
started confusing Bob Woodward with Bob Redford—they’ll tell you: “Democracy
dies in darkness.” But that isn’t it, at all. There isn’t any darkness. There
are no shadows in which to hide our deeds. There aren’t any secrets. There are
just the animal facts, naked and undisguised, right out there in public view
for all to see. Even political journalists can see it, in their few sober
moments, though they may be constrained at most times by professional norms to
pretend that they don’t.
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