Milton Wolf Explains: 'We Use Humor To Try To Deal With Difficult Things'

Dr. Milton Wolf, the Republican senate candidate who is challenging Sen. Pat Roberts in the Kansas GOP primary, apologized again for joking about patients’ X-Rays he posted on Facebook but explained that his black humor about gunshot victims was an attempt to deal with the difficult burden of practicing medicine.

“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 told Breitbart News in his first print interview since the story broke yesterday.

“Day after day, year after year, you deal with the absolute worst tragedies you can imagine. I have had to deliver to people, to families, to moms the worst news they will ever hear in their life. That’s difficult and it takes its toll. I’m a human like everyone else,” he added.

As first reported by the Topeka Capital-Journal, Wolf in 2010 posted X-Rays of gunshot victims with jokes such as “What kind of gun blows somebody’s head completely off? I’ve got to get one of those” and “we all find beauty in different things.”

Wolf apologized for posting the images and joking about them yesterday and said he had removed them from Facebook several years ago. Wolf told Breitbart News he “recognized they were sensitive, so I took them down” but maintained that any personally identifiable information was removed from the images to maintain the privacy of the patients.

“I won’t make excuses or try to blame anyone else for my mistakes. I’ll own them. And I’ll apologize for them, like I have done here,” Wolf told Breitbart News.

But he also hit back hard against what he described as a “character assassination” by Roberts’ campaign and the National Republican Senatorial Campaign, whose spokesman, Brad Dayspring, has aggressively been pushing the story since it was published.

Wolf said when he was considering jumping in the race against Roberts, people close to Roberts threatened to use this type of information against him.

“The Roberts campaign threatened me with this information before I announced,” he said.

A person close to Wolf elaborated that the Facebook posts were “hinted at” but not directly mentioned to him. The Roberts associates, the source said, told Wolf that if he ran, the Roberts operation would “make sure that none of my friends would ever claim me as a friend again.”

Wolf warned Sen. Jerry Moran, the chairman of the NRSC, that he could face repercussions from the campaign committee’s work to spread the story around, and that the NRSC was targeting him because “I’m a conservative, not a RINO like they prefer.”

“Sen. Jerry Moran is the head of the NRSC and will have to take responsibility for the action of NRSC. From the conservative activists here in Kansas that I hear from, Sen. Moran is going to have to answer for the NRSC’s transgressions against conservatives in his reelection attempt in 2016,” he said.

Dayspring said his criticisms of Wolf had nothing to do with ideology, but were made because the revelations prompted questions about Wolf’s judgment and character.

“This is about him, him and his actions. And the more he tries to blame other people, the more desperate he looks,” Dayspring said.

Dayspring warned Wolf is a candidate who, if he won the primary, could damage Republicans nationally like several GOP candidates in the 2012 cycle did. Asked if the NRSC would endorse Wolf if he did win the primary, Dayspring said that “seems like a far-fetched possibility” because of the story and that the campaign committee would deal with that decision in the future if Wolf won.  

Dayspring also noted that when first confronted with the Facebook posts by the Capital-Journal, Wolf said the photos were educational in nature, not a joke.