When John Cornyn and Ciro Rodriguez Need Sympathy

While diligently searching for some political news (hey, you never know the implications of Lindsay Lohan’s latest dramas) I happened on a rather unexpected tale.

Quick! What do Rep. Ciro Rodriguez and Sen. John Cornyn have in common? You’re wrong if you guessed party, ethnicity or likelihood of re-election. (Rodriguez has a battle ahead while Cornyn isn’t even up till 2014).

The answer?  Some crazy dude wants to kill them both. According to Politico, such threats to Senators and Congressmen were up 300 percent in the first months of 2010. The surprise is how many Texans appear in the story. Both Cornyn and Rodriguez found themselves targets by the same man, while Debbie Stabenow, a senator from Michigan got some scary phone calls from one of our state’s less likable fellows.

Politico reports:

Last September, the documents show that a veteran in a counseling session said he wanted to ‘kill everyone who does not help me’ — and that he included in the list Cornyn, Rodriguez and first lady Michelle Obama. When police checked on the man, they found that he was frustrated that those individuals hadn’t helped him with a retirement claim process through the Office of Policy and Management.

Luckily for Cornyn and Rodriguez, before police came, the man’s wife had already hidden his gun collection and wouldn’t let him drive.

Poor Stabenow’s unsavory phone calls came from a Texan man, living alone with 20 guns. (I can’t imagine why he hasn’t found a girlfriend.) Why the threats to a senator whose district is over a thousand miles away? Well, he was just worried that the government would ban Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

Oh.