For those of you who think Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama can sling some mud, check out these brawls. The top political melees, spanning history and the globe, make John Kerry’s Swift Boat seem like the Love Boat, and the smear campaign about John McCain’s black love child (um, he doesn’t really have one) seem like a silly game of telephone.
Here are my favorite political brawls of all time:
1. Shoe Fight in Taiwan
According to the Taipei Times, just last year, the Taiwanese Parliament—infamous for bawdy brawls—descended into chaos after lawmaker Wang Shu-hui threw a shoe at Speaker Wang Jin-pyng. The shoe missed its target, instead striking the face of another lawmaker and soon the Parliament was involved in a WWF-style smack down (video).
2. Taiwan Redux
One year before throwing her shoe at the Speaker, Wang Shu-hui snatched a written proposal to create direct transport links with Mainland China and shoved it into her mouth. The Taipei Times reported that opposition party leaders pulled her hair to try to get her to cough it up, but their antics failed. After the attention waned, she spat out the proposal and ripped it into pieces.
3. Caning in the U.S. Senate
In May of 1856, the U.S. Senate chamber transformed into a combat zone when Representative Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery Democrat from South Carolina, entered the chamber and slammed his metal-topped cane into Senator Charles Sumner’s head. Brooks struck again and again, bloodying Sumner as he lurched about the chamber. According to the U.S. States Senate Web site, Sumner, an antislavery Republican from Massachusetts, had maligned Brooks and his pro-slavery friends, like Stephen Douglas of Illinois, whom Sumner had called a “noise-some, squat, and nameless animal … not a proper model for an American senator.” Ah, sweet revenge.
4. A Hit on the Competition
Just last year in Atlanta, concluding a storyline worthy of a gangster epic, former DeKalb County Sheriff Sidney Dorsey confessed to ordering the murder of his political rival (and DeKalb County Sheriff-elect) Derwin Brown. According to media accounts Brown was shot eleven times as he walked up his driveway after returning from a party celebrating his graduation from the Sheriff’s Academy, his wife’s birthday, and his impending inauguration as Sheriff.
