County judge is right to mock the ‘mattress guy’
What’s in name-calling
Regarding “Lina Hidalgo hits back over Mattress Mack’s election lawsuit, calling ‘the mattress guy’ ‘comical’,” (Feb. 16): After last November’s election, Houston furniture salesman Jim McIngvale got offended when County Judge Hidalgo referred to him as, well, “a furniture salesman.” Now, as McIngvale sues Harris County over the election in which the candidate he heavily backed lost to Hidalgo, he gets offended when she refers to him as “the mattress guy,” even though he cheerfully promotes himself as “Mattress Mack.”
I wonder if Ray Kroc would have been offended if referred to as “the hamburger guy,” or Henry Ford as “the car guy.” I doubt it. If anyone should be offended, you’d think it would be Hidalgo, whom Mattress Mack and his surrogates have called, among other things, “arrogant,” “insecure,” “spiteful,” “smug,” and “a sanctimonious bully.”
Given the choice, I’d much rather be called a furniture salesman or the mattress guy.
David Bradley, Spring
People tell you who they are if you listen. McIngvale, aka “the mattress guy,” attacked Hidalgo after she criticized his arguably frivolous lawsuit over the November 2022 election by asking what Hidalgo has “ever accomplished in her life.” It’s an odd question to ask the county judge of the thirdmost-populous county in the United States. Hidalgo immigrated to the United States as a teenager and attended public high school in Katy. She graduated from Stanford University and was part of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law’s honors program. She also received the prestigious Omidyar Network Postgraduate Fellowship.
At only 27 years old, she was elected Harris County’s first female county judge. She has been on the cover of Time magazine and was named to the magazine’s 100 Next list and Forbes 30 under 30 list. She received the Jack Brooks Foundation Leadership Award and the John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award. She identifies dozens and dozens of her major accomplishments on her government website.
She became a U.S. citizen by choice. If McIngvale believes Hidalgo is a nobody who has accomplished nothing, imagine what he
thinks of the teachers, firefighters, reporters, police officers, construction workers, homemakers, janitors, engineers, architects and all the other ordinary Houstonians who are his customers. Imagine what the guy who took out a newspaper ad in which he referred to himself in the third person as an “icon” and who was caught on camera screaming curse words at opposing sports fans thinks of you. Rand Nolen, Houston
Republicans continue to exemplify the meaning of the term “sore loser” — first the election losers in the midterms and now Mattress Mack.
One has to wonder, would Mattress Mack be so concerned if Alexandra del Moral Mealer had won the Harris County judge election? Nah. I did not think so. Ike Harper, Sugar Land