Louisiana Sen. John “Foghorn Leghorn” Kennedy surely got his comeuppance during Tuesday’s attempted ambush of Dr. Megan Ranney of the Yale School of Public Health before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The St. Tammany self-styled scaramouche apparently thought he could browbeat the good doctor, though it was never abundantly clear just what point he was trying to make in his effort to get the good doctor to commit to a barrage of preconceived notions.
It’s admittedly rare that Kennedy, who relies mostly on pithy platitudes to make a point rather than hard statistics but on Tuesday he talked himself into a corner with his only defense being an annoying habit of constantly interrupting Dr. Ranney even as she tried to answer his weird line of questioning.
He really tripped himself up when he attempted to ask her about the gun-related death rate in Chicago. Now, no one is going to argue that gun violence has reached critical mass in the Windy City, but his effort to paint gun violence against the backdrop of those “who lawfully have a gun in their homes for protection, or perhaps for hunting” he suddenly found himself groping to recover the high ground.
Characterizing Chicago as the “LARGEST OUTDOOR SHOOTING RANGE,” he asked Dr. Ranney if she thought the city’s high number of gun deaths was “because of a finite group of criminals who have rap sheets as long as King Kong’s arm,” She shot back that “Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri have higher firearm death rates, obviously there’s certain…”
She never got to finish her point because Kennedy’s ego will not allow him to hear facts that clash with his opinions. But the fact is, Louisiana, with the nation’s HIGHEST homicide rate, does indeed stand as a more dangerous killing field than Chicago and, get this: Chicago, in 13th place, ranks well behind number-4 New Orleans and number-5 Baton Rouge in its homicide rate.
Now Kennedy grew up in the Baton Rouge suburb of Zachary in East Baton Rouge Parish and his official residence is now in St. Tammany Parish, which is situated generally between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, so he should have been aware of those statistics before he opened his PLATITUDE-LADEN MOUNTH.
Nevertheless, Dr. Ranney soldiered on, pointing out that she was an academic and not a politician but did manage to say that she thought that contributing factors to gun violence included “easy access to firearms, combined with environmental conditions and lack of great education. There have actually been studies showing that when you green vacant lots and repair abandoned buildings in urban neighborhoods, you see decreases in gunshots and violence as well as decreases in stress and depression in the neighborhoods around them.”
Kennedy’s response? “No disrespect, Doc, but that sounds a lot like word salad to me.”
Word salad? Wow, Foghorn. Way to keep the testimony on a higher plane.
I’ll give you this: you do know how to appeal to the worst instincts of your base.
For your enjoyment (or disgust), I have included a video of the exchange. You can watch it by clicking HERE.
Louisiana Voice 
I recommend everyone view the attached video of Kornpone Kennedy getting his ignorant and misguided arse skewered on his own petard. Of course the good doctor adversary to Kornpone came into the fray with a distinct advantage. She had facts and logic to support her position whereas Kornpone only had a “cheat sheet” prepared for him by The Heritage Foundation.
Foghorn leghorn Kennedy is a real embarrassment to Louisiana
Kennedy has degrees from Vanderbilt, Virginia Law School and Oxford. Yet he plays to the educational level of the voters he relies on so as not to offend their ignorance or appear elitist. He could certainly make his point relying on fact and logic, if fact and logic were on his side. But they aren’t, which is why he adopts the bumpkin approach. He’s playing to his voters and they don’t give a damn about facts or logic.