In what is apt to be the single most provocative personnel change in Washington after the elections, the Washington Post reports that Congressman-elect Allen West, a Republican of the Tea Party persuasion, has hired Joyce Kaufman, a local conservative talk radio commentator known for her provocative and sometimes incendiary statements, as his chief of staff. Kaufman, who has been described as “husky-voiced”, is known for comments like this one about illegal immigrants: “If you commit a crime while you’re here, we should hang you and send your body back to where you came from, and your family should pay for it.” The Post says that in accepting the position, she said “”Over these months I have been blessed to form very wonderful relationships with the West family. I looked at this family and [told] myself, how do you not fight and put them up on the pedestal when we’ve got this garbage up on the pedestal now, people like Nancy Pelosi?” So here you have it: a rabble-rouser in a manager’s job, a bomb-throwing bitch in a collegial enterprise, a confirmed outsider in a job typically performed by consummate insiders, a flamboyant attention-seeker in a job performed by character actors. Something’s got to give.
