It sounds like the start of a bad joke: "An Obama supporter and a Hillary supporter walk into a kitchen..." But this one is not a joke. We have two men, Jose Ortiz and his brother-in-law, Sean Shurelds. Ortiz supports Hillary Clinton in the upcoming presidential election, while Shurelds favors Barack Obama. Now, recently the Clinton-Obama race has gotten a little feisty, and these two enthusiastically followed suit.
It seems that they decided to settle once and for all who the better candidate was. The setting for this settlement? The kitchen in a house in Montgomery, Pennsylvania. The debate was very heated and grew progressively more so, with insults to both candidates flying.
Finally Shurelds, the Obama supporter, decided he'd heard enough. He proceeded to attempt to choke Ortiz, I suppose to shut off the alleged blasphemous support of Clinton. According to Ortiz, Shurelds knocked him to the floor and started punching him and choking him. Ortiz, not a man to take this lying down, responded by pulling his knife and stabbing Shurelds in the stomach.
If Ortiz is convicted on his felony assault charge, he won't be able to vote for Clinton. So I'm not quite sure that this method of persuasion is very effective; in fact, I can almost guarantee it backfired — severely, at that.
I suppose the lesson here should be obvious: presidential politics, while interesting, is not interesting enough to stab people or choke them over. I highly recommend that if you have a fierce partisan interest in one candidate or another, you leave the weaponry out of the debate.
