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…

So I read the lede story in The State this morning, and said, “What the…huh?!?”

How could the executive committee of the state Republican Party, after a session in which that party’s governor emoted all over it, overthrow the decision of the state Supreme Court and say, hey, Katrina, you can be on the ballot? How could anyone think for a second that the party had the power to do that? Like the professional valet parking guy said, “What country do you think this is?”

And that was the first thing I was going to blog about this morning. Only I didn’t have time to blog this morning. By the time I was able to turn to it, late this afternoon, the state Election Commission had stated what should have been obvious:

The South Carolina Elections Commission said today that Katrina Shealy’s name cannot appear on the June 12 primary ballot despite being certified by the state GOP executive committee on Wednesday.

The commission said the ballots became official with the names submitted May 4. Shealy had been decertified along with more than 180 other candidates who county parities found had not submitted copies of their statements of economic interest when they filed for office.

But then, just in case that double-double back didn’t throw your neck out of joint, Ms. Shealy promised to do her best to jerk it back in the other direction yet again:

A spokesman for Shealy’s campaign referred comments to the state GOP.

“The State Executive Committee is examining its legal options in light of today’s State Election Commission statement,” the S.C. GOP said in a statement.

Oh, and get this from the governor (in fact, go read the whole story, most of which I’ve reproduced here):

Haley said today that the elections commission should not squash voters’ rights: “Under no circumstances should a government bureaucracy stand in the way of a free and fair election in South Carolina. The people of our state deserve to have their voices heard.”

You see, the duly constituted official authorities — along with the Supreme Court — are “bureaucrats.” Apparently, the decisions about who appears on the ballot should be left up to Nikki Haley, and the state party, if it agrees with her.

Look, I think it’s lousy that all these people got booted from the ballot, too. And Ms. Shealy no more and no less than any other candidate so affected, if they acted in good faith. But you don’t get to make an exception in one instance to the Supreme Court’s matter-of-fact ruling that the law says what it says, even if the governor really, really, really wants you to, with sugar on top.

Of course, one can hardly blame the governor being confused about all this rule-of-law stuff. I’ll confess to being pretty confused about various aspects of this situation. For instance, I need to ask Todd Kincannon, next time I see him, to ‘splain to me how a case about trying to be on the ballot turned into a case about… military absentee votes? Whabba-who? Homina-homina?

There’s just all kinds of bad craziness going on.

OK, so maybe that’s a bit snide. After all, the real UnParty hasn’t even tried to pick a candidate — for anything, much less president. At least Americans Elect gave it a go.

But it didn’t work out, according to Politico:

Americans Elect, the deep-pocketed nonprofit group that set out to nominate a centrist third-party presidential ticket, admitted early Tuesday that its ballyhooed online nominating process had failed.

The group had qualified for the general election ballot in 27 states, and had generated concern among Democrats and Republicans alike that it could wreak havoc on a close election between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

But just after a midnight deadline Monday, the group acknowledged that its complicated online nominating process had failed to generate sufficient interest to push any of the candidates who had declared an interest in its nomination over the threshold in its rules.

“Because of this, under the rules that AE delegates ratified, the primary process would end today,” said the group’s Kahlil Byrd in a statement issued at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. He seemed to leave the door open for proceeding outside the original process, however, adding, “There is, however, an almost universal desire among delegates, leadership and millions of Americans who have supported AE to see a credible candidate emerge from this process.”…

When I first heard about Americans Elect sometime last year, I was briefly excited about it. I even spent an hour or so answering the seemingly never-ending questionnaire about my political attitudes that I found on the group’s website.

But before I could even get around to writing about it on the blog, I started having my doubts, and decided to sit back, wait and see.

What gave me pause was the online process itself.

The Web is an awesome tool for many purposes. It beats snail mail all hollow. It’s a great way to shop (as long as you don’t want to examine the merchandise closely). And it enables us to do all sorts of things we couldn’t do before — such as share videos — with a wide audience. And it can be used effectively in the service of many political aims — the first serious step in any campaign is the establishment of a Web presence.

But I worry when we start using it as a substitute for analog participation. I especially don’t like the idea of online voting — or any type of voting that makes the process too easy. Perhaps I should say, too facile. I believe excessive ease breeds carelessness, and we have enough careless voting going on right now. People should have to think about how they’re going to vote, and go to a certain amount of trouble to go cast their votes.

As for forming a political movement from scratch… well, I think maybe “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” might be a better approach than an Ollie-Ollie In Come Free online invitation. If you’re trying to forge a Third Way movement, it seems like you need maximum interaction among people committed to the ideas upon which your movement is based, honing the principles involved and deciding upon standard-bearers — then turning to the public for input.

Or so it seems. Admittedly, I’m sort of thinking out loud here, and I welcome your input.

In any case, the approach that Americans Elect chose was doomed to fail. With the process wide open, it was predictable that what happened would happen — the group ended up with Ron Paul as its top vote-getter. As I’ve noted in the past, one of the best ways to boost readership of a blog is to put “Ron Paul” in a headline. Paulistas love them some Interwebs.

The main two problems with that result were 1) Rep. Paul is far on the outer fringe of one of the parties, the very opposite of the kind of centrist candidate the group was seeking, and 2) He didn’t want the group’s nomination anyway.

What the group wanted was someone of the ilk of Joe Lieberman or Lamar Alexander — either one of which could have persuaded me to vote for the ticket. But sensible guys like that do not get spontaneously nominated by a mob. You have to put them forward deliberately, and promote them in a concerted manner.