The Associated Press is lost. It can’t understand what’s going on in America this year, and its hopeless attempts to come up with an explanation are leading it to indulge some of the year’s biggest losers in their predictable exercises in blame-deflection – mixed in, of course, with the AP’s usual propaganda disguised as news.

I give you, Congressman (but not for long) Bob Inglis, Republican of South Carolina. Mr. Inglis was destroyed in his primary this year by local prosecutor Trey Gowdy. How badly destroyed? How about by 42 percentage points? That’s pretty destroyed.

Now, many people can tell you why Inglis lost, although none of them work for the AP. Inglis lost because America finds itself in a precarious fiscal situation and needs to elect people with certain qualities in order to fix that situation – and Inglis does not possess these qualities. America is careening toward fiscal insolvency because of Congress’s refusal to get federal spending under control. Solving the problem means electing people who will reform entitlements, reject pork-barrel politics and stop trying to kick the can down the road so the next generation of Americans can deal with the problem.

Gowdy may or may not prove to be that kind of congressman. He says he will be. And Inglis has already demonstrated conclusively that he is not. So, nice guy though he may be, the voters of his district kindly and quite decisively requested that Inglis vacate the premises.

This has the AP befuddled because it doesn’t fit into the AP’s concept of how the political world works. To them, incumbents who are not embroiled in a scandal of some sorts are re-elected. They certainly don’t go down in primaries. And they certainly don’t get bazooked by 42 percentage points.

So in an attempt to explain all this, the AP highlights what it sees as Inglis’s brave, high-minded denunciations of Glenn Beck, whom he labels a divisive fearmonger. But that is just an entry point for the AP to take a shot at one of its favorite targets – Sarah Palin.

Now, let’s back up for a second. You will recall that Palin denounced the ObamaCare socialized medicine bill for the fact that it will likely lead to “death panels,” a description that refers to committees of “experts” who will make decisions about who gets life-saving treatment and who doesn’t – largely based on what it will cost the government.

You will also recall that the major media, particularly the AP, screamed long and loud to anyone who would listen that there are no death panels in the bill. The media made this insistence so many times that the left-wing propaganda group MediaMatters declared Palin’s statement “debunked” based on the fact that the media said so many, many times, which qualifies as evidence of truth in the twisted world of MediaMatters.

What you may not recall is, as documented in this column and elsewhere, the bill (now a law) absolutely does contain the panel to which Palin refers. It is called the Independent Payment Advisory Board, and it is so important to the supporters of ObamaCare that Harry Reid added a stipulation that it cannot be eliminated without a two-thirds majority vote of both houses of Congress.

But the AP has, for nearly a year, treated Palin’s death panel comment as an established falsehood. So the AP now sees Inglis as the tragic victim of his own courageous honesty because he, too, bought the AP’s propaganda:

He cited a claim made famous by Palin that the Democratic health care bill would create “death panels” to decide whether elderly or sick people should get care.

“There were no death panels in the bill … and to encourage that kind of fear is just the lowest form of political leadership. It’s not leadership. It’s demagoguery,” said Inglis, one of three Republican incumbents who have lost their seats in Congress to primary and state party convention challengers this year.

Inglis said voters eventually will discover that you’re “preying on their fears” and turn away.

Poor Bob. He lost the seat to which he had a divine right because he wouldn’t join in the horrible demagoguery practiced by Sarah Palin, and now that his career as a congressman-for-life has been cut tragically short, the AP must run to him for an explanation of all that has gone wrong in American politics.

Because people who lose primaries for their own seats by 42 points are usually the smartest people in the room, don’t you know?

Bob Inglis lost because his constituents know more about ObamaCare than he does, and because he doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to do what’s necessary to fix this country’s problems. People who do – people like Sarah Palin and those she supports – are getting the chance in more and more places because people are beginning to understand the consequences of continuing to elect slugs like Bob Inglis.

The Associated Press, unsurprisingly, is nowhere near understanding any of this, which is why you will not understand the truth about this country by getting your news from the AP.

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