Dunbar, reached Friday and pressed about the encounter, said the two were walking near each other backstage when Young said angrily, "You're not from Cordova any more than I'm from Fort Yukon. I had you looked into." Dunbar, raised in that Southcentral Alaska town after his family moved there from Eagle in the Interior when he was a child, said he tried politely responding to Young. Young grew up in California and moved to Alaska as a young man, not long after serving in the U.S. Army in the mid-1950s. Dunbar, who now lives in Anchorage, said he was puzzled and in a friendly gesture touched Young on his arm lightly and asked: "What are you talking about?" Then: "He freaked out," said Dunbar. "There is no other way to describe it."
NBC News producer Frank Thorp V caught the late-for-the-conference-meeting Alaska Republican's manhandling of an unsuspecting staffer on camera. Per Thorp's Twitter feed, the aide had attempted to redirect Young to enter the already in-progress GOP strategy session through another doorway when things got physical.
On Tuesday, The Daily Caller's Mirror blog reported that Alaskan Republican Rep. Don Young was clowning around on the House floor during the naming of a post office. He stuck his fingers in his ears and made funny faces, much like Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble on The Flintstones. Post office namings, as you might imagine, are not terribly exciting legislative moments in Washington. But this one actually meant something. Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) sponsored the bill to honor a fallen solder.