Dec 02 2007
The Clinton Campaign Flirts with an Early Detonation While Leland Eisenberg Shears Off the Folds of His Graying Mustache, Yawps Like A Heartbroken Penguin, And Convenes With Chris Farley in a Van Down by the River
Like a fiend in a cloud
With howling woe,
After night I do crowd,
And with night will go;
-William Blake
In the terminal moments of Tommy Boy, the 1995 comedy staring Chris Farley (Tommy Callahan), a desperate Tommy straps a batch of road flares onto his chest and marches into the office of auto-parts tycoon Ray Zalinsky (Dan Akroyd). With the aid of the news crew trailing him, Tommy forces Zalinksy to purchase a half-million Callahan brake pads, thereby saving the business of his recently deceased father and foiling the avaricious plot of his step-mother and her lover. Despite the fact that he takes a corporate boardroom hostage by threatening to detonate himself, Tommy incurs no repercussions from law enforcement for his actions. In fact, afterwards he simply returns to a prototypical Midwestern town, makes a sappy speech, and then climbs into a dingy that stagnates in the middle of a lake.
Is Leland Eisenberg a Chris Farley fan? Does he have a picture of him on his wall, a few DVD’s in his bedroom? Did he watch Tommy Boy early Friday morning before he decided to take a drastic action he’d forever regret?
Did he think that when he waltzed into Hillary Clinton’s Rochester, New Hampshire campaign office, pulled back the folds of his jacket to expose a package of road flares that he claimed were dynamite, and demanded to talk to Hillary—in order to ensure better insurance coverage for himself and others maligned with mental illnesses—that he would leave in the same manner of triumphant exaltation in which Tommy Callahan left Ray Zalinky’s office?
I guess, only Leland knows.
A man with a checkered past that the political press is in the process of rabidly unraveling, Eisenberg first made waves in Rochester in May, when he called an impromptu press conference in front of City Hall to protest a new policy of police placing fliers in unlocked vehicles to warn their owners of the risk of auto theft.
“This is nothing more than a gimmick to get around the Constitution and go around in the middle of the night upon unsuspecting citizens in their own yard and search their vehicles,” he said at the time.
According to Rochester authorities, Eisenberg had also recently been accused of domestic violence by his ex-wife, and was due to appear in court on such charges around the time he burst into Mrs. Clinton’s campaign office. Furthermore, he had also been previously arrested for criminal mischief and violating a protective order, and was reported by his ex-wife to regularly abuse drugs and alcohol. However, the most violent and salacious details of Mr. Eisenberg’s life come from the deep past.
In a lawsuit, which he filed against the Boston Archdiocese in 2002, Eisenberg claimed that he was previously the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a parish priest. According to the suit, Eisenberg was 21 at the time, and was homeless and living in abandoned cars in a junkyard, before he went to the Roman Catholic Parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria in Westford to look for assistance. Upon his arrival, he confided to the senior priest details about “the loss of his mother and the abuse he suffered at the hands of his violent alcoholic father,” the lawsuit states.
Eisenberg was assigned a job as a painter in exchange for room and board, and alleges that while residing there one of the priests would regularly show him pornographic material and then molest him. The lawsuit goes on to state that on one occasion, the priest picked Eisenberg up at a club. On the ride home, a drunken Eisenberg passed out, and when he awakened he found himself being RAPED in the driveway of the church by the priest in question. He jumped off a bridge in an attempt to kill himself a week later.
The lawsuit names Archbishop Cardinal Bernard Law—who resigned in 2002 after court documents revealed that he moved priests from parish to parish without disclosing sexual abuse allegations—as the defendant.
And if these allegations prove to be true it will be hard to not feel sympathy for Mr. Eisenberg, especially as he’s being rung up on a slew of kidnapping charges and packed away somewhere dark for the rest of his life. Of course, his actions are illegal, immoral, and downright shockingly delusional, but in the midst of the grandiose progressive agenda of egalitarian health care that Hillary and her counterparts are espousing, they better be damn sure they recognize the severe need for universal mental healthcare in this nation as well
Over 57 million Americans have been diagnosed with some sort of mental disorder, and by the time next November rolls around, you can be assured that number will jump significantly. In addition, up to 1/3 of the homeless population in this country suffers from severe mental problems such as schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, and at this moment at least eight of the ten transients huddled in the alley below my window are exhibiting signs of being totally nuts.
Slashing the budgets of mental health programs became hip under Ronald Reagan, and since then state and federal support for the mentally ill has grown increasingly miniscule. Shockingly, the discontinuation of government-funded treatment has yet to teach the mentally unstable to shape up.
In fact, America keeps getting crazier.
One out of seven of those reading this article have been diagnosed with a severe mental disorder, and that doesn’t even take into account the thousands of individuals who refuse to seek treatment despite the fact that they have the delusional belief that Fred Thompson would be a good President. The bottom line is that desperate people take desperate actions, and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign is lucky that Friday’s incident didn’t prove to be more tragic than it was. The bottom line is that our government needs to start helping those too estranged from reality to help themselves.
As for Mr. Farley, unfortunately his cinematic immunity didn’t transfer over into real life. Insecure about his weight, and unable to find affection from the opposite sex because of it, the comedian dabbled heavily in escorts, alcohol, and hard drugs—checking in and out of rehab centers a total of 31 times. On December 18, 1997, he was found dead in his apartment at the top of the John Hancock building in Chicago. He was the victim of a massive drug overdose.