Confessions of a Tea Party casualty

Bob Inglis is a Republican Congressman from South Carolina with a 93% lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union. But on June 22nd this year, he was defeated in the primary runoff for re-election 29% to 71% because he wasn't sufficiently loony conservative enough for the crazies who now control the GOP.

Hey, I can't feel too sorry for Republican leaders who've been hoist with their own petard. The GOP has been wooing the crazies for more than forty years (beginning with their "Southern Strategy" of appealing to southern white racists after the Democrats outlawed official segregation, and continuing with fundamentalist Christians during the Bush years). But here's a fascinating article about a right-wing politician who discovered that the lunatics really have taken control of the asylum:

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.

A lesser man - say, nearly any other Republican politician - would have simply agreed with them and sent them away happy. I've got to give Inglis that.

Shortly before the runoff primary election, Inglis met with about a dozen tea party activists at the modest ranch-style home of one of them. Here's what took place:

I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there's a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life's earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, "What the heck are you talking about?" I'm trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, "You don't know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don't know this?!" And I said, "Please forgive me. I'm just ignorant of these things." And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.

OK, so he didn't try to set them straight, either. But he apparently had some qualms about this kind of thing. Unfortunately, he was just about the only one.

Inglis found that ideological extremism is not only the realm of the tea party; it also has infected the official circles of his Republican Party. In early 2009, he attended a meeting of the GOP's Greenville County executive committee. At the time, Republicans were feeling discouraged. Obama was in the White House; the Democrats had enlarged their majorities in the House and Senate. The GOP seemed to be in tatters. But Inglis had what he considered good news. He put up a slide he had first seen at a GOP retreat. It was based on exit polling conducted during the November 2008 election. The slide, according to Inglis, showed that when American voters were asked to place themselves on an ideological spectrum—1 being liberal, 10 being conservative—the average ended up at about 5.6. The voters placed House Republicans at about 6.5 and House Democrats at about 4.3. Inglis told his fellow Republicans, "This is great news," explaining it meant that the GOP was still closer to the American public than the Democrats. The key, he said, was for the party to keep to the right, without driving off the road.

Inglis was met, he says with "stony" faces: "There's a short story by Shirley Jackson, 'The Lottery.'" The tale describes a town where the residents stone a neighbor who is chosen randomly. "That's what the crowd looked like. I got home that night and said to my wife, 'You can't believe how they looked back at me.' It was really frightening." The next speaker, he recalls, said, "'On Bob's ideological spectrum up there, I'm a 10,' and the crowd went wild. That was what I was dealing with."

Still, I don't want to give Inglis too much credit. As I say, this stuff has been building for years, and Inglis was right in there urging the crazies on:

Inglis acknowledges he's intimately familiar with extreme politics. He was part of the GOP gang that went after Clinton and impeached him for the Lewinsky affair:

I hated Bill Clinton. I wanted to destroy him. Then I had six years out [after leaving Congress in 1999] to look back on that, and now I would confess it as a sin. It is just wrong to want to destroy another human being and to spend so much time and effort trying to destroy Bill Clinton—some of it with really suspect information. We went on and on about Whitewater. We had talked about the strange things about Vince Foster's death. The drug dealing at Mena airport. So in the six years I was out, I looked back and realized, "Oh what a waste."

It's easy to say that you're sorry afterward. Meanwhile, you've gotten exactly what you wanted. Likewise, these are the statements of a man who knows that he has no political future. I give Inglis some credit, certainly, but he's no hero.

After all, this is what the Republican Party has been working towards for decades now. This is where their sick relationship with Fox "News" has led them. This is what comes from sucking up to white racists and right-wing religious fanatics. They tried to use the lunatics, and now they find that they're riding the tiger and can't dismount.

So I don't feel sorry for Republican politicians, not at all. I feel sorry for the rest of us.