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Kansas Senate candidate Milton Wolf is trying to recover from a social media scandal — he posted macabre X-rays of gunshot victims on Facebook — by explaining gallows humor to Breitbart.com. In an apparent attempt at humanization, his wife also tweeted the unusual image below, a black-and-white, somewhat eerie photo of Wolf embracing her in a hospital bed. This may not the best way to salvage his campaign.
Wolf, a radiologist in Overland Park, Kansas who bares a passing resemblance to New York City’s own Dr. Zizmor, is challenging Sen. Pat Roberts in the Republican primary. On Saturday evening, The Topeka Capital-Journal reported that a dig into his social media history unearthed a series of gory photos and jokes that sound like they come straight from a dark corner of Reddit. On Sunday afternoon, Karrie Wolf, the wife of Kansas Republican Senate candidate Milton Wolf, tweeted the photo above, saying, “THIS is my husband. Amazing father best friend and physician. #blessed Milton Wolf @miltonwolfmd.” Karrie Wolf, according to her husband's website, "suffered a ruptured splenic artery aneurysm" while training for a marathon in February 2013. It is touching that Wolf cares so deeply for his wife, but the photo does not entirely succeed in convincing us that he's just an average Joe.
Then, in an interview with Breitbart News published on Monday afternoon, Wolf explains that he used humor as a coping mechanism after treating patients and telling numerous families their loved ones had died. Wolf says that every joke is mean to somebody:
“We all try to get through difficult things. I suppose humor in of itself is just that. If you stop and think about it, every single joke that exists, or everything you've ever laughed about is at somebody else's expense. It's at someone else's pain. And I think we use humor to try to deal with difficult situations."
Wolf has issued an apology, and accused Roberts of whipping up a storm over the posts in an attempt at character assassination. Now another campaign has just begun: to clean up the mess and help save Wolf from any future embarrassment.