Thinking of you, Bob Inglis
by Tom Sullivan
The Village media are only slowly, maybe, opening their eyes to the fact that the T-party shock troops in the House really are off their nuts. ("Sie haben nicht alle tassen im Schrank," as German friends used to say. They don't have all their cups in the cupboard.) Frank Bruni describes them this way:
Those bomb throwers are mirrors of the voters who are saying no to Jeb Bush, no to Chris Christie, no to John Kasich, no to anyone who was once or could soon be the darling of the northeastern Acela corridor.
That's describing GOP electeds and their constituents politely.
Digby already posted the transcript and video of Republican congressmen Charlie Dent and David Brat going at each other yesterday on Meet the Press. What was astounding was watching conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt dress down both of them:
HUGH HEWITT:
A pox on both your wings. I am very and desperately hoping that Paul Ryan is praying about it and accepts this and here's my question. Yesterday a Russian jet was set down in Turkey. Yesterday almost 100 people were killed in Ankara, Turkey. The world is on fire. How dare you, with the American people waiting for leadership, paralyze the House? Charlie, you have to stop going on CNN and blasting David. And David, there are like 15 of you people. The Freedom Caucus is, like, 15 people. Paul Ryan's is like by 225 Republicans. Get with the program, guys.
What Hewitt means is, can't we all just drop some bombs? Real ones, not rhetorical? And the Götterdämmerung Caucus is a few more than 15.
The GOP insanity is bad news for Hillary Clinton, of course, but nothing Villagers have any journalistic reason not to have noticed before now. Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Santorum four years ago were just the warm-up acts, Bruni notes. Plus South Carolina's Trey Gowdy who defeated not-conservative-enough Bob Inglis in a June 2010 primary. Back home, the T-party called him "Bailout Bob" for voting to prevent the collapse of the U.S. financial system.
Who were those voters who pitched Inglis for T-party Trey Gowdy? Inglis, if you recall, discussed that in a post-primary interview with Mother Jones:
During his primary campaign, Inglis repeatedly encountered enraged conservatives whom he couldn't—or wouldn't—satisfy. 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.
To any Villager just catching on to where these people are coming from, the immortal words of John McClane: Welcome to the party, pal!