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Inglis: I got Teabagged
It was the middle of a tough
primary contest, and Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) had convened a small
meeting
with donors who had contributed thousands of dollars to his previous
campaigns. But this year, as Inglis faced
a challenge from tea party-backed Republican candidates claiming Inglis
wasn't sufficiently conservative, these
donors hadn't ponied up. Inglis' task: Get them back on the team. "They
were upset with me," Inglis recalls.
"They are all Glenn Beck watchers." About 90 minutes into the meeting,
as he remembers it, "They say,
'Bob, what don't you get? Barack Obama is a socialist, communist
Marxist who wants to destroy the
American economy so he can take over as dictator. Health care is part
of that. And he wants to open up
the Mexican border and turn [the US] into a Muslim nation.'" Inglis
didn't know how to respond.
I'll tell you how you respond to that - you say, "You
people are insane. use your damn head
and realize Beck is a crying handjob who's using your stupidity to gain
power, fame and money."
As he tells this story, the veteran
lawmaker is sitting in his congressional office, which he will have to
vacate in a few months. On June 22, he was defeated in the primary
runoff by Teabagger Trey Gowdy,
who had assailed Inglis for supposedly straying from his conservative
roots, pointing to his vote for the
bank bailout and against George W. Bush's surge in Iraq. Inglis, who
served six years in Congress during
the 1990s as a conservative firebrand before being reelected to the
House in 2004, had also ticked off
right-wingers by urging Teabaggers to "turn Glenn Beck off" and by
calling on Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.)
to apologize for shouting "You lie!" at Obama during the president's
State of the Union address.
For this, Inglis, who boasts (literally) a 93 percent lifetime rating
from the American Conservative Union,
received the wrath of the tea party, losing to Gowdy 71 to 29 percent.
In the weeks since, Inglis has criticized
Republican House leaders for acquiescing to a poisonous, tea
party-driven "demagoguery" that he believes
will undermine the GOP's long-term credibility. And he's freely
recounting his frustrating interactions with
Teabaggers, while noting that Republican leaders are pushing rhetoric
tainted with racism, that conservative
activists are dabbling in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory nonsense, and
that Sarah Palin celebrates ignorance."
I predicted it many times:
These Teabaggers are picking off the old-guard Republicans.
Their power seems to be killing Republican incumbents.
Can a Teabagger win a general
election?
I say no, except in teabag states - OK, TX, UT, WY, AL, etc.