One of the last questions that a credible candidate for U.S. Senate wants to be asked is "Do you still post pictures of dead people on the Internet?" But that was a question Tim Carpenter of the Topeka Capital Journal asked Kansas Republican Milton Wolf on Saturday. Wolf didn't have a good answer.
Wolf, the Tea Party challenger to longtime incumbent Senator Pat Roberts, is a doctor in suburban Kansas City who posted images of gruesome patient X-rays on the Internet, specifically on his Facebook page. He claimed that the pictures served to demonstrate the evil in the world. However, Wolf was hardpressed to answer questions about jocular comments that he made on the posts, including one where a patient's head was blown off by a gun which the Senate candidate compared to the movie Terminator 2, writing “It reminds (me) of the scene from 'Terminator 2' when they shoot the liquid metal terminator guy in the face at close range and it kind of splits him open temporarily almost like a flower blooming. We all find beauty in different things."
In response to the story, Wolf, previously best known for being a cousin of Barack Obama, went on the offensive against Roberts, a three-term Senator who previously served sixteen years in the House of Representatives. In a statement, the Tea Party affiliated radiologist said "Senator Pat Roberts wants to attack me as a doctor rather than giving Kansans a reason to vote for him. It's sad. Pat Roberts has not been able to identify a single issue on which he thinks I am wrong and so he's doing things the Washington way: character assassination." Previously, after the New York Times published a story pointing out that Roberts did not have a home of his own in Kansas, Wolf sent out a series of press releases labelling Roberts a Virginia Republican.
While Wolf has been considered to have an uphill battle against a well-funded incumbent like Roberts, the gap between the two seemed to be narrowing before Saturday's revelations. However, with Kansas's August 5 primary more than five months away, Wolf still has plenty of time to try to recover. In the meantime, it would be wise for the Kansas Republican to avoid posting anything on social media, especially pictures of dead people.
