Eric greitens embarrassing fantasies of political violence. By Phil clay, clay a national book award winner is the author of missionaries and teaches at Fairfield university's MFA program. His new book is uncertain ground citizenship in an age of endless war. There's always been something a little pathetic with how Eric greitens publicizes himself. After the Osama bin Laden raid, he went on cable show after cable show Hawking his memoir and explaining how seals, like himself operate, but always forgetting to mention that he'd never actually served with a SEAL Team in combat. Later, when he ran ads for governor in Missouri, he again highlighted his seal background, despite pushback from the seal community over how they felt he was misrepresenting himself. He succeeded in that campaign only to lose the governorship amid allegations of blackmail, campaign finance violations, and felony invasion of privacy charges. But now that he's running for Senate, he's reached a sad Nader with his latest ad in which he leads a gun toting camouflage wearing team into a suburban house to go rhino hunting. In other words, hunting and killing Republicans who aren't sufficiently hard line. You can even purchase a rhino hunting permit on his website for $25, playing with advocating political violence is clearly an attempt to generate horrified backlash and perhaps to distract from recent allegations from his ex-wife that brightens abused her and their children. But greitens has a long history of successfully leveraging American attitudes toward the military and service of his own projects. First, in a nonprofit world, and then in politics, and so what's interesting about his recent campaigning is not what it says about him as a candidate, but about what he thinks his constituency wants from former navy seals. And it isn't defending Americans from foreign terrorists. He's also not alone during the Senate campaign in Georgia, Texas House representative Dan Crenshaw cut a much more expensively produced ad in the style of a marvel movie where, after jumping from a helicopter, he lands on a car in Georgia filled with two members of antifa and proceeds to attack them. The cringe inducing performance shared similar images of militarized politics and a hatred of domestic rivals, though this flirtation with violence didn't help him when a group of far right protesters shouting eye patch McCain assaulted his campaign staff at Republican Party of Texas. It's a common enough thing in the wake of failed wars, such as Iraq and Afghanistan for people to look for internal enemies. We were stabbed in the back has been the rallying cry of so many disappointed veterans through the centuries. This feeling pours out into a state of general indictment, wrote German World War I veteran Ernst junger in 1932 into a literature of the blind who are constantly in search of those responsible. When things go awry in your country, you either have the fortitude to look in the mirror or you hunt for scapegoats. Gratins used to take a different approach. In the first decade of the post 9 11 wars, he spoke of selfless service and a commitment to rebuild American communities. He tell a.