TN voters renominate scumbag to Congress.
NASHVILLE—Two abortions. Maybe three, if you count the one he pressured a girlfriend—who happened to be his patient—to get. Pulling out a gun during an argument with his first wife. Prescribing pills to another patient while they dated. Getting reprimanded by the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners for dallying with patients, an ethics violation.
Voters in Tennessee’s 4th Congressional District had plenty of reasons not to vote for incumbent Scott DesJarlais last week. The Tea Party Republican might have snuck under the radar to win a first term in 2010 and held back an onslaught of negative publicity long enough to capture a second one in 2012, but a third time? When conservative voters in this district, which stretches from the edges of Chattanooga to Nashville, went to the polls, they were widely expected to run off a pro-life, family-values conservative who had shown in divorce court that he could bend those beliefs in his own life. If this was supposed to be a throw-the-bums-out kind of year in Congress, then DesJarlais was the ultimate bum, and he ought to have joined Ralph Hall, Kerry Bentivolio and Eric Cantor as the only incumbent members of Congress to lose thus far.
But clearly, the voters thought otherwise. If current results hold—and so far, there’s no reason to believe they won’t—DesJarlais appears to have captured the Republican nomination again by a mere 37 votes. All that would stand in his way to a third term is accountant Lenda Sherrell, the Democratic nominee in the heavily Republican district.
As a reporter who has followed DesJarlais these past 21 months, I have watched with a mixture of amazement and respect as he—running for re-election for the first time since it surfaced that his personal life could have been a storyline from “Nip/Tuck” and written off by political handicappers in both Tennessee and Washington—has managed to mount a comeback with little money or political support. In a year in which incumbents have beaten back challengers nationwide, a DesJarlais win could very well be the most extraordinary feat of them all, putting him alongside the likes of Ohio’s notorious James Traficant, who served nearly 20 years despite charges of tax-evasion, taking bribes from mobsters and forcing his aides to clean horse stalls on his farm, in the ranks of some the most improbable congressional hangers-on of all time.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/scott-desjarlais-reelection-110028.html#ixzz3AgUHWRYA
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