If you're in Texas politics, you want your name to be "Yarborough" And barring that you at least hope to make "Yarbrough".
The D.K. Elections Liveblog tonight mentions that "Grady Yarbrough" is doing well in his race for Congress tonight, and that takes me back to a story that I learned only because I was unfortunate enough to spend some time in a federal prison in Texas in the eighties.
Ralph Webster Yarborough made a real name for himself as a Democratic liberal Texas member of Congress in the sixties (and well earned by my estimation). And then along comes a "Yarbrough" in the eighties who wanted a cheap and easy ticket to the good life, so he registered as a Dem and ran for the Texas Supreme Court. And he won solely on the basis of name recognition. And I say "solely" because he was already under investigation for some fraud charges.
But first he got elected, and then he got charged, tried, and convicted. And, needless to say, the other members of the Texae Supreme Court could and did play all of the games necessary to keep him from having any meaningful role on The Court between election and "impeachment".
And then the sorry bastard had the unmitigated misfortune to move on to medical school in Grenada just almost exactly when Reagan sent our troops in to "liberate" the Island. So there was clearly one of our students there who did not kiss the runway before being "placed" on the flight "back home".
And then, a short time later, we crossed paths in Federal Correctional Institution Texarkana. I hung out in the law library, and he in the Chapel. I worked to help free folks as well as I could. He, on the other hand, worked not at all, as near as I could tell.
Chuck Colson, he was not. (Or maybe he was a whole hell of alot closer to it than anyone who has not been there would be able to tell.)