Calling Jeff Gunter a swamp creature would be an insult to swamp creatures

Interesting public service comparison: As an Army captain, Sam Brown got blown up serving in Afghanistan; As ambassador to Iceland, Jeff Gunter deserted his post. (Dr. Jeff Gunter for Senate campaign photo)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

Jeff Gunter’s self-financed Senate campaign has thus far earned him little chance of winning the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen in the general election.

But it has secured him a spot among the ranks of the most offensive office-seekers in Nevada political history.

Last month Gunter ran an attack ad on the Republican primary frontrunner, Sam Brown. The ad was ostensibly about a Federal Elections Commission complaint against Brown and the fact that Brown is backed by the Washington D.C insiders at the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

In an homage to Donald Trump’s false promise to “drain the swamp,” the ad called Brown “the newest creature to emerge from the swamp.” 

But the real point of the ad was to show graphically and disgustingly doctored images accentuating the scars on Brown’s face, the result of injuries inflicted on Brown by an improvised explosive device when Brown was serving in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan in 2008.

The Gunter ad then shows images of Mitch McConnell, Nikki Haley, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and other political figures, each of their faces similarly doctored to look like a gruesome “creature” from the “swamp.” The images are obviously intended to mimic – and remind the viewer – of Brown’s scars.

Showing grainy, unflattering, and manipulated images of one’s opponent is standard fare in political advertising. But Gunter’s ad was uniquely disgusting.

Or as a commenter on Gunter’s YouTube channel put it, “Pretty trashy to be mocking a wounded vet’s facial disfigurement like this.”

Gunter, who was registered to vote as a Democrat as recently as 2021 in California, is a dermatologist, and owns a chain of clinics. As it states on his campaign website, he is “Dr. Jeff Gunter.”

Doctors are people too, possessing both merits and faults. For instance, Gunter is the kind of doctor who ridicules a burn victim for their scars in the hope that doing so will boost his own implausible political aspirations.

Gunter was also an ambassador to Iceland during Trump’s administration. (Interesting public service comparison: As an Army captain, Brown got blown up serving in Afghanistan; As ambassador to Iceland, Gunter deserted his post.)

Judging from the caliber and character of both Gunter’s failed tenure as an ambassador and his Senate campaign, he wasn’t named an ambassador because he demonstrated tact, a mature regard for mutual respect, a capacity to grasp complex issues, or other characteristics befitting a diplomat, including basic human decency. 

Gunter’s key qualification must have been a not uncommon one for ambassadors: making a lot of very large campaign contributions. Because no one with anything approaching an ambassadorial temperament would run the sickening ad Gunter ran against Brown.

Ambassador Dr. Gunter may (or may not) be a reputable physician. But he’s a quack politician, and his only hope is and always was an endorsement from Trump. 

Trump is an impetuous clown, so anything could happen. But with less than six weeks before the June 11 primary, and with only about three weeks before mail and early voting starts, the chance of Gunter getting Trump’s nod in the Senate primary seems imperceptibly small. 

There are a lot of reasons not to want Brown to be a U.S. Senator, chief among them being that Nevada is one of the states that will decide not only whether Trump will be president, but whether there will be an obedient Trump-worshiping Republican-controlled Congress unquestioningly carrying out his every command, however pernicious and/or unconstitutional.

His recently revealed enthusiasm for bringing nuclear waste to Nevada, his opposition to a woman’s right to control her own body, his willingness to apologize for Trump’s thuggery and embrace Trump’s authoritarianism – Brown’s politics can be loathsome. 

But he was also forced to confront an adversity that thankfully few of us can fathom, and whatever else anyone may think of him, his personal success in addressing that adversity is undeniably impressive and admirable. Nobody, whatever their political party, can or should try to use the visible result of Brown’s military injuries against him.

And that’s what Jeff Gunter is: A nobody.

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