Phil Bailey, exposed to Jake, misbehaves

This just goes to show you what peer pressure can do to you.

Phil Bailey, Wesley Donehue’s co-host on “Pub Politics,” has always been an easy-going, reasonable guy who gets along with everybody — even his opposite number, Wesley. (Phil works for SC Senate Democrats, Wesley for the Republicans in that same body.) You couldn’t ask for a nicer guy. (Well, maybe you could, but who’d listen?)

Then a video surfaces showing him listening to Jake Knotts ooze ethnic intolerance all over him (“She is a sheik, and tryin’ to be a Methodist…”) — and Wesley, and the impressionable young Boyd Brown, and the elegant Anne Peterson Hutto (at least, I think that’s who everybody was; the picture was blurry).

And now… Phil is in all sorts of trouble for having called Nikki Haley a… let me get this right… a “Sikh Jesus.” From The State‘s story. No, not “sweet Jesus;” that’s something your grandpa used to say when he was deeply moved and grandma wasn’t around:

Phil Bailey, the S.C. Senate Democratic Caucus political director, was reprimanded and told to take down his Twitter feed after calling Gov. Nikki Haley a “Sikh Jesus” in tweets, a Senate leader said.

Bailey’s tweet on Wednesday came after Haley spoke to the S.C. GOP executive committee before the group voted to certify Katrina Shealy to run in the Republican primary against Sen. Jake Knotts of Lexington. Shealy was among more than 180 candidates punted from the ballot after the state Supreme Court ruled office seekers needed to file a paper copy of their statement of economic interest.

Bailey tweeted: “@nikkihaley is the Sikh Jesus. She can resurrect an unlawful campaign from the dead by simply appearing at a @SCGOP hearing,” according to a report from BuzzFeed. He used the term “Sikh Jesus” in another tweet…

Now what that tells me is that Phil was as flabbergasted as I was at what the state GOP presumed to do in the Shealy case. Only I, being older and more courtly, was not so shocked as to engage in blasphemy.

This got Phil in so much trouble that he was forbidden to play on the interwebs. For how long, I don’t know. Surely not for long. Not even the state Democratic Party, as clueless and out of the swim of things as it is, could think that a guy could represent it effectively in 2012 without a Twitter feed. Heck, even Cindi Scoppe’s got a Twitter feed these day.

Anyway, I hope Jake really is sorry for what he started

7 thoughts on “Phil Bailey, exposed to Jake, misbehaves

  1. Karen McLeod

    I thought what Gov. Haley did was bad enough. If Mr. Bailey is a democrat, why does he want to make Ms. Haley look like she’s taking the high road? Mr. Bailey may have intended to insult Ms. Haley, but he simply made his own party look bad.

  2. Ralph Hightower

    Phil Bailey will be missed on Twitter.

    I thought it was a funny tweet.

    The State didn’t fire Robert Ariail for putting SC Governot Nikki Haley on an elephant.

  3. Kathy

    Haley can do literally anything and never pay the piper—the crazier and more self-serving, the better. But someone posts something immature on Twitter and SC is aghast. Sweet Jesus.

  4. Greg

    I got reprimanded ny an umpire at a baseball game yesterday. Do I have to stop tweeting?

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