A South Carolina Republican Congressman said he was ousted from office because he refused to hate President Obama enough and declined to call him a “socialist.”
Rep. Bob Inglis chucked multiple verbal bombs back at his own party on the way out of office, saying the GOP has surrendered its soul to the crackpots and extreme right wing of the conservative movement, including the Tea Party.
“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 [of Congress], I looked back and realized, ‘oh what a waste.’ ”
Despite serving 12 years in Congress and receiving a 93 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, Inglis was soundly defeated in the Republican primary. He said he refused to prostitute his principles to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. It was this kind of ruthless political savagery that he wanted to avoid his second time around in Congress.
When Inglis returned to Congress in 2005, he vowed not to give in to the lowest common denominator of behavior of fear-mongering and race-bating.
“To encourage that kind of fear is just the lowest form of political leadership,” he said, according to the New York Daily News. “It’s not leadership. It’s demagoguery.”
Pundits say Inglis became a victim of ideology gone awry and a perfect example of the extreme conservatism that moderates and liberals abhor. And as the Shirley Sherrod case illustrates plainly, conservatives are not interested in the truth or justice. They just want to destroy him with any tool or mechanism that will work. This is why they are trying to paint Obama as a socialist, a politically damning and damaging term if it were to stick.
“To call him a socialist is to demean the office and stir up a passion that we need to be calming, rather than constantly stirring up,” Inglis explains. “Why do I have to see Democrats as my enemies? I’ve got al Qaida. I’ve got the Taliban. I’ve got enough enemies.”
Apparently, Republicans like having enemies, especially the one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. –terry shropshire
