He Likes To Play Dress-Up
This election season has given us a lot of crazy candidates who probably would never had a chance to win. America has gone bonkers. Rich Iott, the Tea Party-backed GOP candidate for U.S. House of Represetatives in Ohio’s 9th district has to take some kind of nutter prize. He has an unusual hobby:
The Atlantic’s Josh Green reports that millionaire businessman Rich Iott, the Republican nominee challenging Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D) in Ohio’s Ninth District, has an unusual hobby: He likes to pretend he’s a Nazi.
Iott, a tea party-backed candidate, spent time fighting another battle before he hit the campaign trail against Kaptur as a member of the 5th SS Wiking Panzer Division, a group of Ohio World War II reenactors.
According to their website, the Wikings strive to “salute” the “idealists” from occupied northern Europe who saw the Third Reich as “the protector of personal freedom and their very way of life” and signed up to fight for the Wermacht and “gave their lives for their loved ones and a basic desire to be free.”
You know who else liked to dress as a Nazi? Hitler.
Tags: OH-09, Republican Crazy, Rich Iott
And Glenn Beck
It’s interesting that he says:
“It’s purely historical interest in World War II,” Iott, a former grocery chain owner and member of the Ohio Military Reserve
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/10/ohio-tea-partier-spent-weekends-playing-nazi-games.php?ref=fpa
But he does not seem to ever dress as one of the Allies from what I can tell from the article.
My fiance is a WWII reenactor (there’s a presence here in DE, he does Canadian) and there’s two kinds of german WWII reenactors: 1. the kind that like the preserve history (who usually go “grunt” units like gross deutcheland, which wasn’t specifically nazi affiliated, to help explain the daily life of a soldier we don’t hear about a lot) and 2. the ones who are kind of weird and dress up like nazis (who often do units that didn’t really do much during the war, did stuff that can’t really be reenacted like air force/tanks, SS and other high level nazi officials). There’s some overlap between the two groups (a guy who just does it for the history and NOT the ideas) and but there’s a not insignificant amount of neo-nazi participants in SS units.
Once at Ft. Indiantown Gap (which as a large-scale battle of the bulge event) he accidentally stumbled into some sort of creepy nazi ceremony one of the SS units was doing. With like candles and a portrait of Hitler and shit.
Not saying this guy is like any of those guys, but thought I’d throw in what I know since i know some.
There’s also some guys that bring both kits, in case one side has more than the other (ex. after band of brothers/private ryan EVERYONE in WWII suddenly wanted to be 81st airborne).
My fiance does that a lot at his Vietnam reenactments, he brings his GI and his VC, but he always has to be the bad guy so they’re both represented.
I guess the pictures of me from the Renaissance Faire will doom my future candidacy for office.
and the photo of me in the stocks of said Renn Fest
haha that’s where i was this weekend.
Another picture of this GOP whacko in his costume drag.
Oh No!
Now he’s calling out Eric Cantor and claiming his costume drag is *educational*.
I think that when “W” set the bar so low for the presidency every nutter in the nation figured s/he would make a good candidate for something. They are crawling out of the woodwork. Somebody should write a book about the field of 2010 candidates. What a lovely bunch of coconuts.
I think the crazy thing Auntie Dem, is that some of these coconuts will win. Our next Congress should be a joy.