Lost Soul? Concerned Conservatives Worry About Trump

Bob Inglis

“Donald Trump is reshaping the heart of the GOP into something that is very dark and very diseased. My nightmare scenario is a Republican Party that loses its soul. It’s one thing to lose an election. It’s another to lose your soul.”

--Bob Inglis, former Republican Congressman, S.C.

Former Congressman Bob Inglis is part of a growing movement of conservative Republicans who view "Trumpism" with more than just alarm. The group's leaders include Evan McMullin, who ran in 2016 as the “Never Trump” presidential candidate, and Bill Kristol, co-founder of the Weekly Standard, and conservative columnists Mona Charen and Max Boot.

They have issued a statement calling on House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell "to make clear, both publicly and privately, that they support the Mueller investigation and regard any interference with that investigation, including dismissal of the special counsel or preemptive pardons of investigation targets, as completely unacceptable."

They have become especially concerned that months of attacks on Mueller’s integrity in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News, Wall Street Journal, and New York Post might goad or inspire Trump to fire Mueller and thus spark a constitutional crisis.

“The infotainment side of the conservative media [Fox News], they’ve been completely Trumpified for some time,” Mona Charen said. “The Wall Street Journal was another story. That was surprising to me. I didn’t regard them as part of the Trump right. When they wrote an editorial suggesting that Mueller resign, I felt that needed a response.”

And respond they did, taking the high moral ground against Trump: "It is morally imperative that the Republican Party and the conservative movement stand as bulwarks of the rule of law, not enablers of its erosion and violation. Now is the time for choosing."

South Carolina Republican Blasts His Party's Know-Nothingism

Who is this man? Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), rated by the American Conservative Union as 93% pure conservative, yet a Congressman who takes global climate change science seriously and who was defeated in his primary because of it ... by a tea party ignoramus who doesn't believe in science but who does believe in certain birther myths.

What did this man do yesterday? At a House subcommittee hearing on climate change, and from the vantage point of no longer giving a good goddamn whose toes he steps on because he'll be out of office in a matter of weeks, lectured his dumber-than-dirt colleagues about two things coming down the track: global climate change and the dominance of the new green technology by China:

"...we're here with important decisions to be made. And I would also suggest to my Free Enterprise colleagues -- especially conservatives here -- whether you think it's all a bunch of hooey, what we've talked about in this committee, the Chinese don't. And they plan on eating our lunch in this next century. They plan on innovating around these problems, and selling to us, and the rest of the world, the technology that'll lead the 21st century. So we may just press the pause button here for several years, but China is pressing the fast-forward button. And as a result, if we wake up in several years and we say, 'geez, this didn't work very well for us. The two doctors [industry-paid skeptics of global warming] didn't turn out to be so right. 98 [scientists who do see global climate change coming] might have been the ones to listen to....

"There are people who make a lot of money on talk radio and talk TV saying a lot of things. They slept at a Holiday Inn Express last night, and they're experts on climate change. They substitute their judgment for people who have Ph.D.s and work tirelessly [on climate change]."

Meanwhile, all of the Republicans vying to chair the House Energy Committee -- which handles climate and energy issues -- in the new Congress are climate change deniers. They include Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), who infamously apologized to BP shortly after the company's catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last summer, and 87-year-old Texas Republican Rep. Ralph Hall, the leading candidate to take the gavel in the next Congress. Congressman Hall took a potshot at the White House's use of the term "global climate disruption" and said that "reasonable people have serious questions about our knowledge of the state of the science."

These are some of the same folks who want "creationism" taught in the public schools, along with "abstinence only."

Idiocracy ain't just a wildly improbable comic movie any longer.