You would think wearing a bulletproof kimono, being frequently accused of sexual harassment, having participated in a disastrous police raid that ended in the death of 100 chickens and a puppy, and believing himself to be a reincarnation of a 17th-century Tibetan monk (among other things) would be more than enough to keep Steven Seagal out of public office. But that hasn’t stopped pervasive rumors about him considering a run for, say, governor of Arizona, the state where he lives since becoming Kimono pals with the nearly equally incompetent/delusional Joe Arpaio.
Seagal himself has always laughed off such rumors, but this pull quote from a recent Playboy article of Seagal being praised by California representative Dana Rohrabacher sure sounds like there are some people out there who’d like to groom the old poonani lover for a political run. Rohrabacher compared Seagal to Ronald Reagan, which is basically the Republican equivalent of being passed the conch.
“You know, I used to work for an actor. His name was Ronald Reagan, and he made a lot of difference, but there were people in the press who constantly tried to put him down and disparage him with the idea that, ‘Oh, he’s just an actor.’ Well, acting is a noble profession. Steven has used his prestige to do good things for the cause of peace and to bring cooperation between the United States and Russia, and I think that’s wonderful.” [Playboy, current issue]
The article, incidentally, was about Seagal being flown around to tour Russian arms factories (which is still going on – the latest Getty Image of Seagal shows him at an arms show in Zhukovsky four days ago) in the hopes that he’ll become “the face of the Russian arms industry.” Basically, Russia still has massive military industrial capabilities leftover from the Cold War and Russian arms manufacturers think Steven Seagal has the clout to pressure the US State Department into changing a rule limiting the import of Russian weapons to the US market. Seagal does ads for Russian arms and one company even named a sniper rifle after him (marksmanship being one of the roughly 12 million things Steven Seagal claims to be an expert in).
But back to the quote. Just to recap, a congressman who idolizes Ronald Reagan for being tough on the Russians just reverently compared Reagan to Steven Seagal, an actor who has essentially become Russia’s chief apologist in the US.