Wes Craiglow is the Deputy Director of City Planning & Development for the city of Conway, AR. He is also a Tyler Pearson supporter, which he has shown by having a Tyler Pearson sign in his yard and re-Tweeting a recent Pearson campaign video.
Apparently, these passive-yet-affirmative statements in support of Pearson[foot]Who, by the way, anyone who isn’t a terrible person should be supporting, for a whole host of reasons.[/foot] were just too much for the notoriously thin-skinned Sen. Jason Rapert to take. So Sen. Rapert sent the following text to Craiglow:
Sen. Rapert then called Craiglow and spent nearly twenty minutes badgering Craiglow about his reasons for supporting Pearson, boasted that Rapert had a “17-point lead” in certain undisclosed polls, and then went completely off the rails of logic and reason by accusing Craiglow of trying to “destroy” and “slander” him. Because, you know, that’s exactly what putting someone’s sign in your yard equates to, and it’s not at all insane to suggest as much.
If you are surprised that Sen. Rapert would react poorly to the thought that someone chose “is you ain’t” when it came to supporting the Homer Stokes of Bigelow, AR, you simply haven’t been watching closely. This is a cat who will use his ministry’s P.O. Box and phone numbers for campaign purposes, deny that it’s a problem, and then claim to be an open book while simultaneously refusing to actually provide information. This is a feller who writes nearly 3,000 words that basically paint him as the victim in the wake of a Pulaski County Circuit Court’s overruling of Arkansas’s gay-marriage ban. And this is a dude who is so offensively condescending that he can’t even get through a debate without coming across as a pompous blowhard:
So, getting his panties in a wad and chastising a city official because that official doesn’t support Rapert? That’s just business as usual.
UPDATE (8:24 a.m.): Sen. Rapert apparently responded to this whole issue on Craiglow’s Facebook page last night.
It’s what you would expect; lots of “look at me — look at these things I did — my words I said to you didn’t mean what they said!” In fact, Rapert’s response is only worth reprinting here because of how it ends. “Just support your candidate, you don’t have to tear other people down.”
Wow. Ok. First, Wes Craiglow did not tear anyone down. He posted a screenshot of an unsolicited text from Sen. Rapert, and he wrote that people should be aware of Rapert’s veiled threat to not support city development projects if Craiglow was going to vote for Tyler Pearson.
Second, “tear other people down”? Really? You mean by, say, calling your opponent “boy,” telling him to “act like a man” under your breath, and just generally trying to bully him throughout the debate? Or are we talking more about posting hateful, bigoted messages on your own Facebook page and then deleting the comments of anyone who dares to disagree with you, even when those disagreements are civil and provide evidence in support of what the person is saying?