COMMENTARY | Political campaigns are often reviled for their negativity. Attacks ads fill television and radio time. Candidates criticize each other cruelly. Something new and despicable happens just when you think politics cannot go any lower. The bar has just been reset by some criminal-minded person murdering a political staffer’s cat and leaving it for his children to find.
Ken Aden is running for Congress in Arkansas. His campaign manager is named Jacob Burris. Burris returned home on the night of January 23 with his kids in tow. The four children found the family pet murdered, the corpse in before their front door, with the word “liberal” spray painted on the body, according to Reuters.
The cat’s head had been caved in by blows so hard they left the animal’s eye hanging from the sockets in its mutilated head.
Aden appeared in a CNN interview to condemn the crime and state publicly that he does not believe his political opponent had anything to do with it, shaking his head in bewilderment and calling the act, “crazy, just crazy.”
People get heated about politics. It’s something many of us have seen. Discussion turns to debate and debate turns to shouting matches. Friendships end over political matters. This tragic event crosses any imaginable line of human decency, though.
It’s beyond my comprehension to understand how anyone could do this. The obvious guess is that someone from the right wing objected to Aden so strongly he took his anger out on the campaign manager by killing his pet. Anyone that full of hate over a political idea, who can sum up their anger with the word “liberal,” and who thinks that justifies animal cruelty and traumatizing children is deranged. Calling the perpetrator an animal would be an insult to animals.
The Huffington Post reports that it was a 5-year-old child who discovered the dead pet and that the FBI and local law enforcement have been contacted for the investigation. Whoever killed that cat, be it an individual or group, should be caught and the courts should throw the book at them.