Texas Rep. Steve Stockman Vanishes, Supposedly Still Running For Senate

You might think that someone running against an incumbent senator would be a bit more visible, but Texas Rep. Steve Stockman, who's running against John Cornyn, seems to have disappeared from Washington and hasn't voted in the House since January 9. He's missed everything since then, including a chance to vote no on the budget. Stockman has made a single campaign appearance in Texas, and also went to Egypt with some other House members; otherwise, he's been out of sight, which is maybe a bit odd with the primary coming up on March 4. Has anyone checked the Appalachian Trail?

Stockman, who Molly Ivins once calledTexas’s “proudest contribution to the national Knot-Head Quotient,” has been sort-of campaigning online, at least, with a really cool website called "Cornyn Loves Obamacare," which attempts to show that despite voting against the bill a whole bunch of times, Cornyn actually has a "forbidden love" for socialized medicine, because he did a bunch of socialistic stuff like voting to reopen the government. It's pretty weird stuff, and includes this lovely image:

Until yesterday, the site also featured an image supposedly showing John Cornyn warmly embracing Barack Obama; the photo was pulled without comment after a Politico reporter pointed out that it was a really bad photoshop job, putting Cornyn's face on a photo of former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist:

Considering that this photo helped get Crist labeled a RINO, you'd think Stockman's people would have known that it would be easily recognized -- then again, maybe they figured that if someone's dumb enough to think John Cornyn is some kind of liberal, they wouldn't recognize a crappy photoshop job either. For that matter, maybe it explains Stockman's disappearance -- he's still trying to master the clone tool.

There's also the money stuff -- as we noted a while back, Steve Stockman only fills out filling financial disclosure forms when he feels like it, because who cares about little details like where his money comes from? Looks like his campaign finance filings are just as sketchy; earlier this month, the Sunlight Foundation found some $16,000 in contributions to Stockman's campaign "were nowhere to be found in the committee's financial reports," and a Stockman spokesman actually denied that some of the donations had even happened, although several PACs' treasurers said that their checks had been cashed by the campaign. A new filing yesterday accounted for some, but not all, of the unreported donations. And then there's the $69,000 in back pay that the campaign owes staffers. So maybe Steve Stockman is also trying to master QuickBooks and search the couch cushions for change.

Where else might Steve Stockman be? There's just no telling -- maybe he's on a secret mission to find the truth about Benghazi, or Fast and Furious. Or he's gone to Hawaii to finally get to the truth about Obama's birth certificate? If only he'd wear a distinctive striped hat like Waldo so we could find him more easily. Our best bet? With an eye to the future, he's learning the noble art of Rodeo Clownin'. 

[ Daily Beast / The Wire / Sunlight Foundation ]

 Follow Doktor Zoom on Twitter. He almost never goes walkabout.