US Senate Candidate Lambasts Opponents, Labels Senate ‘Body for Old Men’

SCHAUMBURG – A candidate for the U.S. Senate of Illinois has launched a salvo of attacks in a bid for office, yet he also counts as opponents a heady number of those whose names will not appear next to his on a ballot next fall.

W. Thomas Olson, a U.S. congressional primary loser in 2020, is undeterred by the number of persons against whom he stands in opposition.

“My opponents in Illinois are summarily zealous nationalists. Partisans in both parties have either run for the gates or run out of gas. One of them stoops regularly to invoke language of religion to fill the spaces of what might have been fruitful public discourse.”

Nor are his opponents confined to Illinois.

“My immediate opponent is one of several committed to sustaining a dim and chummy patriarchy. Old and former governors, old and former soldiers, old and former members of the US House—the place is more like a kennel, it seems, where old and mostly unlovable dogs are deposited.”

Olson argues the problem of personnel is systemic. “For four years, hundreds of members of a congress passed bills in hopes a despotic criminal might sign them into public law,” he maintains. “I would rather lie with stranger bedfellows than wake to fleas.”

Olson points to the many trivialities and symbolic gestures entertained by the upper house in recent years.

“The US senate re-names more bridges in honor of their neighbors than it does finance the construction of new ones, and it will soon beclown itself digressing the merits of investigating UFOs. The idea that the US senate is an enviably deliberative body is a fetish deserving ridicule,” Olson asserts, and adds, “A body for old men should not be entrusted to imagine a future for younger persons—with or without aliens. It should be smashed.”

The candidate is critical also of substantive matters which are now and then addressed in the US senate. “One hundred fawning patriots compounded by a chaplain’s benediction is a quotidian recipe for bills which villainize China, demagoguery which villainizes immigrants, and pseudo debate which suppresses reason,“ Olson asserts. A familiar refrain among those critical of empiric hubris, Olson is stridently unsympathetic to the US senate in this regard also.

“A few old white patriarchs continue to brandish votes cast against authorizing the use of force in Iraq nearly twenty years ago, yet they sat on their hands during voice votes which paved the way to war.”

Indeed, Richard J Durbin of Illinois and Patrick Leahy of Vermont both voted against authorizing the (continued) use of force in Iraq in 2002, yet neither raised an objection to passing the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998, which appropriated funds and military force to “support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussain from power[.]”

An author and publisher from suburban Chicago, Olson describes himself as a renegade candidate of American politics and concedes, “I love both my dogs.”