The GOP's Sad New Whisper Campaign **UPDATE**

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Note: Updated to remove reference to Jeff Roe

Poor Catherine Hanaway.

Her shadowy operatives worked so hard to defeat Tom Schweich, but a new threat to Hanaway’s coronation emerged: Eric Greitens. (You can read all about Eric Greitens, here.)

The GOP establishment’s inept, new whisper campaign against Greitens is so amateurish and sad it evokes the kind of sympathy one feels toward the ignorance of animals (to paraphrase William F. Buckley).

Hanaway’s minions are telling people “Eric Greitens is just like Obama.”

No, I’m serious.

Establishment hacks are whispering to their friends that Eric Greitens’s life story is eerily parallel to Barack Obama’s: both highly educated in elite schools, both spent a lot of time overseas, both have little prior political experience. Oh, and both men have the same number of teeth. And they’re both married with children. Next thing you know Catherine Hanaway will demand to see Eric Greitens’s birth certificate.

Apparently, Team Hanaway considers Eric Greitens' work cleaning up genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia the equivalent of Obama’s community organizing in Chicago. Does Hanaway hold all missionary and humanitarian work in such low regard?

I guess Team Hanaway thinks being a Navy SEAL is a lot like running a failed education program with Bill Ayers.

I’m sure a lot of Republican establishment hacks resent Eric Greitens’s remarkable accomplishments. People whose highest purpose in life is self-fulfillment and self-aggrandizement tend to resent people who serve a higher calling. We all feel a bit inadequate reading The Heart and the Fist. At least, we should. Among healthy, well-adjusted people, that feeling of inadequacy spurs a drive to do more with one’s own life. Eric Greitens makes people around him better people.

Among the little minds who orbit Planet Hanaway, though, feelings of inadequacy turn quickly to resentment and envy. Team Hanaway doesn’t have time for higher purposes–they have lots of selves to serve.

So when you hear friends or acquaintances comparing Eric Greitens–humanitarian, scholar, boxer, veterans' charity founder, and Navy SEAL–to Barack Obama, get quickly beyond disgust and anger; get sympathetic.

Like those Roman soldiers, Hanaway’s minions know not what they do.

_UPDATE An earlier version of this post obliquely implied Jeff Roe was behind the talking points. I have it on good authority that Jeff Roe was not responsible. The same authority assured me Jeff Roe would have taken responsibility if he’d thought of it.  _