If this doesn't make you wish you lived in Arkansas's 1st CD, maybe nothing will!

by Ken

The other day Howie passed along this clip with this note:

That actor with the gun is HOT… but why is he stalking around with the gun and the lighting? Is this supposed to appeal to the gay communities in Jonesboro and Bexar and Heber Springs?

Jonesboro and Bexar and Heber Springs are, I assume, hot spots in Arkansas's 1st CD, currently represented by Republican Rep. Rick Crawford, who is being challenged, it appears, by someone calling himself Jackie For Arkansas. If the guy with the gun, Cpl. Michael Willen, US Marine Sniper, Afghanistan, who apparently lives in the 1st CD, is really looking for companionship, I like to think he might find some in Jonesboro or Bexar or Heber Springs, though I'm sure it's not a snap, and I feel for guys in places like that where the meeting-up process has to be so hard. Still, I take Howie's point. If what Jackie For Arkansas is trolling for is votes in Jonesboro and Bexar and Heber Springs, fronting the hunk may be a stretch of a strategy.

I had to look at the clip more than once, maybe more than twice, but I thought I had it pretty well puzzled out:

Who is the ad directed at? Really now, doesn't the name, "Jackie For Arkansas," tell all? The ad is directed at ARKANSAS, which is what JACKIE is FOR. That and veterans is what Jackie is for. (Pay attention!)

By "actor" you must mean Cpl. Michael Willen, US Marine Sniper, Afghanistan, who is a constituent of this awful veteran-hating Rep. Rick Crawford, who "doesn't need to be reelected" on account of how he voted against the VA reform act. I don't think anything homoerotic is intended, just some exposure to a Real Man, because we Americans really admire Real Men and can't get enough of them, or maybe get hardly any of them. Why don't you ask Rick Crawford why he doesn't show us HIS arms? Of course Jackie For Arkansas doesn't show us HIS arms either, but at least he knows someone with really manly arms. (This would be Cpl. Michael Willen, US Marine Sniper, Afghanistan.)

The important person, though, isn't Corporal Willen, but Sgt. Kenton Hallen, who does all the rest of the talking in the ad, and who I therefore assumed, the first time through, must be Jackie For Arkansas -- until at the end the real Jackie For Arkansas comes on to tell us that he's Jackie For Arkansas and he approved this ad. [Ah, so he's the creepy guy Sergeant Hallen is talking to all that time! -- Ed.] Sergeant Hallen, you'll recall, is the fellow who still hasn't told his wife about what happened in Vietnam, and as best I can piece the thing together, it goes like this:

Rep. Rick Crawford voted against the VA reform act because he doesn't think Mrs. Hallen deserves to find out what happened to her husband in Vietnam, and so we should vote for Jackie For Arkansas because he always stands with our veterans and so he'll make sure Mrs. Hallen finds out, which will be good for Arkansas.

SOME AMPLIFICATIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS

(1) About Corporal Willen: There's no question about the guy's hotness. He also appears to have something on his mind. I think it would be a good idea if he put the rifle down and talked. Dinner, maybe? a long walk by the river?

(2) About Sergeant Hallen: The last thing I would want is to be seen as making fun of his Vietnam PTSD or whatever is afflicting him. I think it's a measure of the pathos of his situation that all these decades later he's reduced to pouring out his heart to Jackie For Arkansas.

(3) About Congressman Crawford: Is there any reason to doubt that the guy is a horror show? I'm not sure, though, that Jackie and I would agree about the nature of the horror.

(4) About Jackie For Arkansas: Yeah, well.

Arkansas's 1st CD

#