Your eyes do not deceive you. That is indeed Mississippi state senator Chris McDaniel, who is currently running a primary challenge against incumbent US Senator Thad Cochran, standing next to our old friend Ali Akbar. For those of you just joining us, Akbar is a convicted felon, an operator of sketchy nonprofits, a possible tax cheat, a backstabbing schemer, a party animal, and a dirty trickster who is actually very bad at his job.
Despite having never won a single election on which he has ever worked, Akbar remains happily employed in the circle of scam that is conservative politics. Lately, he has stayed busy by dodging process service for defamation suits in state and federal court. But he had time to visit Mississippi this week with co-defendant Robert Stacy McCain for what was supposed to be (and very nearly was) a victory party.
This was probably inevitable; a tea party insurgent like McDaniel should attract this pair like a magnet. Akbar always likes to work on insurgent campaigns. McCain has known Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks since at least 2010, when he covered their tea party rallies, and FreedomWorks is just one of many outside organizations that have come to Mississippi to put Thad Cochran out of the Senate. In 2012, McCain was denouncing the Republican establishment when he referred to Kibbe as a personal friend, and now he’s quoting Kibbe about the organization’s dedication to winning the runoff.
McDaniel’s campaign seems to attract felons and weirdos. McDaniel’s courtship of John Bircher-style conspiracy theories, for instance, attracted Clayton Kelly, the conspiracy-addled Ron Paul fanatic who entered Rose Cochran’s nursing home to make a YouTube “hit-piece” on the incumbent senator. Three other men, including McDaniel’s former radio co-host and a McDaniel volunteer, have been arrested over the incident. It was the dirtiest political trick of the year so far, a smear consisting almost entirely of speculation and innuendo…so of course Ali Akbar has been helping to spread the slime. It’s what he does best.
These are people who never saw a smear they did not like, or a lie they could not tell, or a slightly-moderate Republican they could resist trying to replace with a hard-line nutjob. Promoting extremism, peddling hate, and demonization are their main calling in life. McCain, who has already been Akbar’s principal partner in slime for years, is a professional hatchet man and hatemonger. While there is no proof that Ali has used bumbling cutouts for Mississippi mud-making, such a revelation would not shock anyone who has paid any attention to his career, and to find McCain in close proximity to a disgusting, vile smear is as exactly as surprising as a beer in his hand.
Who is that dirty old bum with his arm around Ali?
Emmett Kelly?
Someone who was never taught to remove his hat while inside of buildings?
Unless he’s under arms…?
I keep hoping that one day Sacha Baron Cohen finally admits he’s been playing Ali A. Akbar all along. Only problem with that theory is, if true, Ali should be a lot wittier than his Twitter feed shows.