Ben Cardin sure as heck doesn’t.
For those of you who are video-impaired, I’ll sum up. The guy who wants to be Maryland’s junior Senator just anointed himself the Dumbest Man Running For Office on the Eastern Seaboard and also lost himself the election.
Here’s what he said.
“…well, first let me point out in regards to that..that point, the Patriot Act predates my election to Congress…”
As Allah points out, and as we Marylanders know, Ben Cardin has been a member of the House for quite a while – since 1987. The Patriot Act, used since the day after it was signed by Democrats as one of many bogeymen, was authorized in 2001 (by a margin of almost 6-1 in the House). It was reauthorized in 2006 by a 2-1 margin in the House.
Ben Cardin voted against it both times.
At least I think he did. Given that he thinks now that it was already a law, who in the world knows what he was voting against?
His campaign office calls it a “mistake”, according to what I saw on CNN this evening. I’m not sure how he could make such a stunning “mistake” and not attempt to correct it or explain it almost immmediately.
Regardless of what he does to mend this boneheaded statement, it’s going to hang with him, as it should. Any Congressman worth his salt should not be that terribly confused about a piece of law that has been in the headlines nearly every single week for the past five years. Cardin has been using national security as one of his main campaign issues. He should have been way too familiar with the material to say what he did.
He’s an unserious man running for a serious office at a very serious time. We don’t have time for lightweights like Cardin in the US Senate. We have too many of them already with names like Kerry, Kennedy, Durbin, and Biden. There are a host of people who are plotting right this very minute on ways they can kill as many of us as they possibly can. We need people in our Congress who think about that every single day and are constantly looking for ways they can help foil those plans and kill the planners.
Ben Cardin, as he demonstrated tonight, isn’t one of those people.
