John Kasich: “I’m Kind of Like Jesus, Only Better.”

John Kasich was in Iowa today, doing his best impersonation of Homer Simpson’s dad (as usual), and explaining (as usual) how he’s great and the people who question his massive increases in government spending hate Jesus. That’s when things got a bit… weird:

The Republican hopeful made the comparison during a campaign stop at Loras College, where about 50 people were in attendance. The former U.S. House budget chairman spent most of the meeting taking questions, including one about how he plans to balance the nation’s books.

“I just told people that if we raise taxes and we don’t address the fundamental issues, the state is going to die,” Kasich said of his two terms as Ohio governor.

He said balancing a budget is “a matter of leadership and will.”

“If you have a flock with no shepherd, or a bad shepherd — say the shepherd’s like drinking during the day — what happens to the flock?” Kasich asked. “But when the shepherd is strong, then the shepherd can guide the flock to good outcomes.”

He acknowledged the analogy likely sounded “bizarre,” but added, “That’s how it works.”

If you are thinking that this sounds vaguely familiar, that is because you have been to church at some point in your life, or are otherwise familiar with the words of Jesus from John 10:

¹¹ “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep. ¹² But a hireling, he who is not the shepherd, one who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf catches the sheep and scatters them. ¹³ The hireling flees because he is a hireling and does not care about the sheep. ¹⁴ I am the good shepherd; and I know My sheep, and am known by My own.

Now listen, for an ordinary politician, we would just be here talking about how this is kind of an awkward comparison, and how it really isn’t a great idea for a Presidential candidate to refer to members of the United States Congress (who tend to be strongly egotistical people) as “sheep” who need to be led around to make sure they don’t screw everything up.

But Kasich has well and truly earned the assumption that when he talks like this, he is placing himself in the position of Jesus. John Kasich has repeatedly actually claimed that Jesus demanded that he expand Medicaid under Obamacare in Ohio. This was not an isolated incident – he said it over and over, that he was doing the work of Jesus in causing the government to confiscate tax money to feed the poor.

Kasich is such a fan of cloaking himself in the mantle of Jesus that he’s still doing it two years later, except that he’s now taking it a step further and telling his critics they need to buy a Bible so they can stop being such bad Christians by criticizing his massive increase of the size of Ohio’s government:

At this point, I think we should probably just accept that when Kasich borrows from the rhetoric of Jesus, he does it on purpose and not by accident, and that when he reads the portions of the Bible that pertain to Jesus, he sees himself as playing the part here on earth. Don’t get mad at me for saying it, Kasich is the one who has had the arrogance to claim it multiple times in public.

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