Republican blogger Jason Tolbert posts additional information on Kim Hendren’s intriguing appearance last week before the Pulaski County Republican Committee, and the matter grows ever more intriguing.
Tolbert produces a fine partisan blogospheric scoop and a fact becomes ever more clear: The Republicans are going to require some other candidate for the U.S. Senate – perhaps any other candidate.
It turns out that Hendren, when not making unpopular sense on taxes with views so alien to prevailing conservative fiscal thinking that I liked what he said, apparently referred to U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer as “that Jew.”
It turns out that Tolbert had heard conflicting accounts of this remark, so he called Hendren and asked him, and, typically, Hendren answered, to this essential effect: Yeah, I said it, and shoudn’t have.
Hendren apologized in this phone interview with Tolbert and invoked curiously — I should say inanely — the old Andy Griffith Show.
Right-wingers loved that show. Jim Holt once brought me a DVD of episodes, all of which I’d already seen, and loved, and all of which, by the way, reveal to me that Andy was a dadblamed liberal. He wanted his only deputy unarmed and he was soft on crime at least as far as the town drunk, who came and went from the jail of his own volition, was concerned.
So, anyway, I just got Hendren on the phone. He said he was responding to Schumer’s having talked on MSNBC about how the “hard right” was not representative of mainstream values. He said he remembered saying “the Jew” or “that Jew,” and didn’t know why in the world it came out, but that he did go on seconds later to say there was a Jewish person he did admire, and that would be Jesus. And then he told me that, for that matter, he rather liked Joe Lieberman. He said that “girl out in California,” the one in the pageant who came out against gay marriage, just got pulverized for expressing her view, and, well . . . never mind, he just shouldn’t have said what he said and let’s leave it at that.
Kim said he would surely be putting his foot in and out of his mouth as the campaign goes along because that’s just the way he is.
Gilbert Baker — I hear your party calling.
