What’s wrong with people?

Honestly. I want to know.

This time, our focus turns to Rich Iott, the Republican nominee for Congress from Ohio’s 9th District and a member of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s “Young Guns” program [his name has since been removed from the website], who was also — in the recent past — a World War II reenactor, on the side of the Germans, which involved dressing up as a member of the Waffen SS.

Here’s a great quote from the candidate himself (pulled from the story in The Atlantic):

I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that here was a relatively small country that from a strictly military point of view accomplished incredible things. I mean, they took over most of Europe and Russia, and it really took the combined effort of the free world to defeat them. From a purely historical military point of view, that’s incredible.

Yes, fascinating.

Of course, from the point of view of everyone else, the SS was a gang of murderous criminals. In fact, as the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants reminds us, “the SS was declared a criminal organization at the Nuremberg Trials, and … one of its most notorious crimes was the massacre of American POWs at Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge.”

Iott’s reenactment group has a website, of course. Unfortunately for him,

The group’s website includes a lengthy history of the Wiking unit, a recruitment video, and footage of goose-stepping German soldiers marching in the Warsaw victory parade after Poland fell in 1939. The website makes scant mention of the atrocities committed by the Waffen SS, and includes only a glancing reference to the “twisted” nature of Nazism.

Iott, of course, is absolutely furious about all of the negative publicity. After all, he only ”joined the group with his son as ‘a father-son bonding thing’ and left three years ago after his son lost interest.”

The piece in The Atlantic, Iott’s campaign asserts, “was ‘clearly a hit piece’ by Democrats.”

You know the best way to avoid a “hit piece” by your political opponents?

You guessed it:

Don’t dress up like a Nazi.

Full story: Democrats criticize GOP over House nominee who dressed as Nazi during battle reenactments

And here’s the piece from The Atlantic (where you can also find a photo of the intrepid candidate, dressed as a member of the SS).