If you’ve been living
under a rock for the past few months, you may have missed the fact that Texas
is about to hold election primaries. And
the bigger news is the GOP and its right-wing zinger little brother, the Tea
Party, are about to have a family feud that rivals the Hatfields and McCoys.
Every commercial you hear some would-be candidate is expounding on how he
individually got Ronald Ray Guns elected President (some, even before they were
born).
All ads have this in
common… “I will work to kill anything that has the slightest stench of Obama on
it.” Even senators and state legislators
who cried out for federal funds from the Obama administration during the years
for emergencies and for economic recovery, are now staunchly anti Obama. In
fact that word has become the “O” word.
Kind of like the “N” word in Texas politics. You would think each of
these candidates is running against Obama himself. They are all trying to
squeeze into th tightest corner in the right hand side of the box, that I am
surprised the damn box has flipped over.
(It may well in the general election.)
The claims and the in-
party partisan bickering has leapt to all time highs. Conservatives like John Cornyn are being
called liberal because they voted for a tax increases or for budgets ceilings
to be raised or for simply being there when Congress was in session... and
those are just the starters.
No one has chronicled
this better than Jacqueline Floyd of the Dallas Morning News. As a public service for those of you not
living in the DMN area, here is her column today. Enjoy:
Floyd:
Texas primary election is a wild-eyed race to the far right.
Every
time we got comfortable this weekend — for a meal or a nap or a backlogged TV
episode — the phone rang.
It
was never a person. It was a steady barrage of push polls and robo-calls, all
meant to influence us in the state primary election, which is still an
interminable week away. I may be influenced to jump off a building before we
get there.
As
every Texan is painfully aware, tea party challengers are going after
“establishment” Republicans across the state. The result is a frenzied,
squealing race to the right as candidates vie frantically to be the most
bona-fide rock-solid hard-core conservative in all the land.
A
Houston Chronicle editorial this week called this year’s GOP primary
campaign a “googly eyed, wagging-tongue ritual,” one that turns otherwise
sensible adults into screeching bug-eyed zealots.
A
colleague over at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported last week on a
Tarrant County tea party official who warned followers against voting for
Methodists, claiming that they’re more likely to be tarred with the taint of
liberalism than God-fearing Southern Baptists.
You
can’t tune in for a traffic report on the radio without hearing dark
accusations that this-or-that Republican is a closet liberal who doesn’t love
guns enough, doesn’t loathe the president enough, hasn’t thought of enough ways
to punish and humiliate unauthorized immigrants.
Some
candidates have declined to stoop to this absurdity — there are several
incumbents I can think of who are grimly enduring hysterical demonization from
the way-out-there right. But plenty of them are running scared enough to be
suckered into this craziest-candidate-standing competition.
The
proof is in our mailbox, which daily disgorges a plentiful stack of slick
campaign mailers. A surprising number of them fall back on a nearly identical
formula: The candidate is described as a “proud conservative” beloved by
abortion opponents and pro-gun groups; the opponent is excoriated as, if not an
outright friend of (title conspicuously omitted) Obama, at least a jelly-kneed
moderate; a photograph is shown of the candidate posing at some fundraiser or
pancake breakfast or turkey shoot alongside U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
Those
that can’t produce a photo with Cruz are pictured with the family or a shotgun
or a pickup truck, but these are poor substitutes for the genuine me-’n’-Ted
money shot.
Candidates
for all kinds of office follow variations on this script:
I
will stand tall against Washington, “Obama,” liberals and every combination
thereof. No matter how much chaos it causes, I will never cooperate or work
with them in any capacity. If they get on the same elevator as I’m riding, I
will not push their floor button.
My
all-time favorite constitutional amendment is the second. I love it more than
all the other amendments put together. I support a constitutional amendment
that would replace the First Amendment with the Second Amendment so that the
Second Amendment would come first.
My
opponent says he is a lifelong Republican — if this is true, why did he appear
in a 1971 grade-school history pageant as Grover Cleveland? Why has he offered
no explanation for this troubling contradiction?
If
elected, I will seal off all 1,900 miles of the Texas-Mexico border with a wall
made of red-hot cast iron and topped with live flames and protected by a
50,000-member armed security force. This will be funded by my plan to raise new
Homeland Security funds by eliminating entitlement benefits to anyone whose
cellphone ring tone plays the opening bars of “La Cucaracha” or who owns one of
those oversized souvenir sombreros with “Hecho en Mexico” embroidered on the
brim.
I
will stand very, very tall to define marriage as being between one man and one
woman. The only legal exceptions will be the case of a union between one person
and one firearm or between me and Ted Cruz — I’m just crazy about that man.
I
believe life begins not just at the nanosecond of conception, but when your
great-great-great grandfather was conceived. I would support the concept of all
human life beginning at the conception of the first single-celled organism to
crawl forth from the primordial ooze — if I believed in evolution, which I
don’t.
Well,
it can’t be just us here in Texas. I suppose there may be places in this
country where frantic left-wing candidates are trying to position themselves as
stand-tall anarchists and demonizing their opponents as wavering in their
perpetual outrage toward (title conspicuously omitted) George W. Bush. But we
don’t live in that neck of the woods.
What
we’re getting is our great democratic process in its gaudiest and most exotic
plumage. It can’t end soon enough.
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