Democrat Hillary O’Connor Mueri, a former naval flight officer who served her country in Iraq and also is an attorney, is running for the 14th District Congressional seat, an area comprising parts of some Cuyahoga County eastern suburbs and parts of Lake, Geauga, Ashtabula, Summit and Portage counties.
Mueri typifies the new breed of Democratic women who are stepping up to the plate and running for office. I think they innately know that if enough of them are elected to Congress the resulting lack of testosterone on Capitol Hill would eventually lead to the salvation of the country.
A friend of mine recalls that when he first began practicing law as a public defender years ago, he was good friends with current 14th District Congressman Dave Joyce, with whom he shared an office cubicle as well as a zeal and passion for defending indigent citizens at the Bar of Justice. Joyce later took the same position in Geauga County, and in 1989 he became an assistant prosecutor in Lake County.
From that position he went on to win election to his current seat in Congress, replacing Steve LaTourette, who retired early, soured by Tea Party tactics. From everything I’d known about Joyce, albeit from afar, he appeared to be a decent Republican of principles, but obviously not any more. The TV spots he’s running in this election cycle are beneath what I would expect from him, but I guess they are simply a sign of how low the GOP has sunk.
Although the district he represents comprises areas that have not seen any demonstrations or acts of civil disobedience and are not likely to, his TV spots start with a law enforcement official in uniform grabbing attention, and then cut to a video of vandals throwing garbage cans though windows of downtown Cleveland offices during the most recent demonstrations.
His obvious message to his constituency is that he’s all for “law and order” and will keep them safe in their homes. The question is, safe from what?
Of course Joyce isn’t the first Republican to use scare tactics to attract voters (recall the granddaddy of them all, Bush’s Willie Horton ad in the ’80s) and he certainly won’t be the last. But playing to — and stoking — the imaginary fears of whites is part of what is tearing this country apart, and while such tactics are to be expected from tRump, coming from a former good guy like Joyce is disheartening, to say the very least.
Granted, Joyce is one of the few Republicans with the guts to call for a peaceful transfer of power if tRump loses on Nov. 3, and he has broken ranks with Republicans more often than the majority of his fellow members of the GOP over the years, which only makes his ads all the more puzzling and despicable.
