Dr. Hugh Cort for President

By Mark Grueter on Sat, Jan 5, 2008 3:47 pm

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“My grandpa served in World War II. He was buddies with Patton and MacArthur.”

That’s what the buffoon Hugh Cort said on Friday night at the Alpine Club in Manchester. Cort is a Republican presidential candidate and because the Circle of Friends for American Veterans couldn’t attract any of the actual contenders, they had to invite Doctor Cort to speak instead, a man who is, in fact, on the ballot in New Hampshire (listed first, he excitedly told me, smart enough to suggest that some voters are so stupid or senile that they’ll fall for the first name that appears).

Mr. Cort is what makes all this campaign nonsense almost worthwhile. The guy just walks right up to you and starts racing off his campaign speech with a kind of crazed inhuman gusto. It’s a screed that emphasizes his inside knowledge of an imminent al Qaeda attack on 10 American cities. He recommends a full body search of all “the Mosques” in America as the only potential solution to the impending annihilation of America. To impress us and prove his seriousness, he name drops his “friends” Fred Barnes and some other guys from the ultraconservative Newsmax.

What I don’t quite understand is what makes this guy tick. It’d be easy enough to dismiss him as clinically insane, but there has to be more to it, some underlying causes. He must know that he has absolutely nothing to gain by running, but for whatever reason, that fact doesn’t stop him. What really motivates Hugh Cort, that’s what I need to know. Is it a death wish? Some sort of perverse need to be humiliated?

Cort takes himself seriously. He claims to be both a terrorism expert and, as if the joke weren’t sick enough, a psychiatrist. But behind his bizarre presentation, you do sense a real, live human being somewhere in there, which makes him interesting. He’s not a bad guy; I think he’s just sad, desperate and pathetic, which makes you feel bad for him, more than anything else.

I’ve never heard anyone talk as rapidly and as pointlessly as Dr. Cort. If you gave him 10 seconds to give his view of, say, toll booths, he’d take 45 and then go off on something else, even if you tried to interrupt. The host and moderator did try to interrupt Cort’s speech at the Alpine Club as he veered in several non-Veterans related issues, but Cort kept talking. Said he had to finish his speech.

Because his campaign speech suggested that al Qaeda got its nukes from Russia, I told him that I’ve actually lived in Russia, simply to try to hold the conversation together. But he immediately shied away from me after this, suspecting, perhaps, that I was about to challenge his peculiar ideas. As if I needed anymore evidence…