Rick Perry is looking for a job. Ted Cruz should be looking too. In another line of work.
Voters in Texas have not been well served by most of their Republican lawmakers. In a way, we bring this appalling dearth of leadership on ourselves. Many of us do not bother to vote and far too many of us vote a straight R ticket without knowing who is actually on the ballot below the top candidates. How else would we end up with scoundrels for an Attorney General and an Agricultural Commissioner? And these are the scalawags we know about. There are likely others lurking in the shadows.
That said, Texas has one of the toughest photo voter ID laws in the U.S. It’s hard for 600,000 of us to vote because we lack the proper ID. The Jim Crow law makes it easier for crooks to win elections.
Democrats have our work cut out for us in November. For one thing, Rick Perry wants to make a comeback. Though his Texas miracle turned out to be a mirage given the crash in the oil industry. The state’s natural resource propped up the state’s economy for years. Perry and his right wing policies took faux credit for the booming Texas economy.
As the Texas Governor Rick Perry’s political agendas were no different from his GOP, Koch boy, ALEC supported colleagues. All are running their states into the ground by giving tax cuts to the wealthy. The corporate right wing tools for Koch/ALEC cut services for everyone else in order to pay for the tax cuts.
This precisely how the state of MI poisoned the residents of Flint, MI.
Rick Perry recently endorsed Donald Trump and went as far as to say he would serve as his Vice President.
It could be that the former Texas Governor is bored. Maybe the anti-government Governor is cash strapped,too, now that he’s no longer the state’s top welfare queen. For Perry no longer lives in a posh taxpayer funded mansion stocked with fine wines and one in which includes a generous budget for entertaining crony capitalists, lobbyists and donors. No longer Governor, Rick Perry has to pay for all this stuff himself.
I guess desperate times can lead to desperate measures. Politics make strange bedfellows, all right. Arch enemies who hate one another can become passionate love birds after an election. I utterly loath you but I need you, your power and earning potential. Let’s kiss and make up.
Last July Rick Perry angrily insisted that Donald Trump is a cancer on conservatism. He threw his support behind then Presidential candidate Ted Cruz, “a true conservative leader.” According to Perry Trump is a fraud.
He offers a barking carnival act that can be best described as Trumpism: a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued," Perry said at the time.
Donald Trump’s response? Rick Perry should be forced to take an IQ Test.
Actually, Rick Perry is the pot calling the kettle black. Rick Perry is known for his own mendacious gaffes and buffoonery. But I guess there’s nothing surprising about a Republican Presidential ticket that is comprised of a confederacy of chilling clowns.
Meanwhile Republican primary voters kicked Ted Cruz’s derriere pretty damned hard in Indiana last Tuesday. Knowing that voodoo math and rhetoric couldn’t save his desperate candidacy Cruz dropped out the race after a blistering loss. I suppose Cruz wanted to salvage what he could of his reputation as a sneering, sanctimonious anti-government tea party Republican so he can run again in 2020. His hope might be that most of us will forget that the unlikeable Cruz is as dangerous as Donald Trump. Trump is a blatant outspoken nationalistic fascist. Cruz, on the other hand, is a Christo-fascist who will co-mingle his religious beliefs with his political ideologies and agendas. He will find religious rationales for going to war with other countries.
Pick your poison Republican voters. But you have become accustomed to drinking a toxic brew for a very long time. And until now most of you seemed willing to have willingly swallowed it all along.
Texas voters are growing aware of the fact that Ted Cruz never intended to serve in the Senate when he ran in 2012. It is glaringly apparent that he ran for the office in order to use it merely as launching pad to the Presidency.
Since elected Ted Cruz has done zip, zilch, nada for his constituents. He certainly hasn’t attempted to lift a finger for Houston after it suffered through two devastating floods in 2015 and recently on April 18. Ted Cruz grew up in Houston. He owns a home here. But he is too busy following his personal political ambitions to think about his suffering fellow neighbors. Houston is grateful to the Red Cross, FEMA and President Obama. Obama bashing Governor Abbott must have choked when he asked the President to declare Houston a national disaster area. Houston is also appreciative of our local government and its efforts with FEMA to help the victims of the recent Tax Day flood.
The egocentric Cruz did shut down the government in 2013 thereby throwing some of us out of federal jobs for a couple of weeks. Without paychecks of course. Ted collected his. The government shutdown also ruined pre-planned, prepaid vacations for those of us who booked trips to our nation’s Capitol, its monuments, museums and the country’s National Parks. Our self-serving anti-establishment tea party “leaders” didn’t think about these minor inconveniences. It was all about them taking a stand against the government by sticking to the black guy in the White House. As well as to the American taxpayers who picked up the tab for the tantrum.
The Houston Chronicle’s editorial board, that had originally endorsed Ted Cruz in 2012, to the disgust of many of its readers, recently spanked the self-serving Senator pretty hard.
Smug, sanctimonious and vain, Cruz failed to persuade even the most rigid ideologues or the most zealous evangelicals - voters he considered his base - that he was the man to recapture the White House for a fractured GOP. Despite running a disciplined, methodical and strategic campaign, his demeanor was his undoing. Obviously, Will Rogers ("I never met a man I didn't like") never met "Lucifer in the Flesh."
Now that his 13-month odyssey has come to an ignominious end, we presume to offer a couple of suggestions to the man Texans dispatched to Washington a little over three years ago. One, he should buy a copy of Jon Meacham's magisterial biography of a man who lives a few miles west of the Cruz's high-rise condominium on Allen Parkway and take the time to read this story of a great American. It's the life story of a man who through decades of service to this nation in combat, in Congress, as head of the CIA, as vice-president and as president has been the unfailing exemplar of kindness, decency and selflessness. A chastened Ted Cruz - if that's possible - could learn a thing or two from the 41st president of the United States.
As far as I am concerned voters would do ourselves a huge favor if we purged all of the anti-government politicians from office in November. All are obviously incapable of governing responsibly. To say the least, all are a clear and present danger to our future and our country’s well-being.
Ted Cruz should resign from the U.S. Senate and find work for a tea party think tank, a religious organization or become an “analyst” for Faux News. As a US Senator Cruz is utterly useless to his constituents in Texas. Actually, his egotistical antics in Washington DC have hurt more than helped us.
Get lost Ted. Texas can do far better than you.
Right now there is a lot of teeth gnashing, chest pummeling, and finger pointing manifesting within the Republican Party. For the biggest loud mouthed buffoon, the monumental jerk in America that everyone laughed at is now the head of the GOP pack. It helped that the quintessential jerk, buffoon and a reality TV celebrity received more than a little help from his friends in the cable TV news industry. Cable news became Trump TV whether FOX “News,” CNN or MSNBC.
How did it happen?
You don’t know?
The GOP created its devil. Its beast is well-deserved. As a Democratic activist who has lived in Texas for longer than I care to think about, I’ve witnessed what has become of the Republican Party. As a resident of a red state I live with the consequences of an extremist, morally bankrupted and cynical Party that has become dominated by narcissistic demagogues, greedy, selfish charlatans, freaks, religious fanatics, bigots and nasty right wing ideologues. This is the group that made it impossible for 600,000 thousand of us to vote. Why? Because if most of us voted the bait and switch party wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the office of local dog catcher.
This same cabal of degenerates made it impossible for poor women to have abortions. Why? To please the religious fanatics in the Party who want to impose their rigid and unforgiving brand of Christianity on the rest of us.
For those who wonder how the GOP ended up with Trump as its frontrunner let me remind everyone that 50+ years of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove and scorched earth politics spawned a befitting devil. Years of fooling voters with bait and switch politics didn’t help either. Making impossible, mendacious promises on the campaign trail while distracting base Republican voters with the “evils” of transgender bathrooms, gay marriage, Obamacare and fear mongering abortion has finally backfired. Voters might have been troubled by social wedge issues but many are angry because they finally get it. They have been had. Once elected their GOP leaders switch to serving its donor classes. This has been going on for a long time.
The Wrath of the Conned
Things are very different among Republicans. Their party has historically won elections by appealing to racial enmity and cultural anxiety, but its actual policy agenda is dedicated to serving the interests of the 1 percent, above all through tax cuts for the rich — which even Republican voters don’t support, while they truly loathe elite ideas like privatizing Social Security and Medicare.
What Donald Trump has been doing is telling the base that it can order à la carte. He has, in effect, been telling aggrieved white men that they can feed their anger without being forced to swallow supply-side economics, too. Yes, his actual policy proposals still involve huge tax cuts for the rich, but his supporters don’t know that — and it’s possible that he doesn’t, either. Details aren’t his thing.
Establishment Republicans have been screaming that Trump is not a conservative. Republican voters don’t seem to care. Trump said he’s a conservative but what difference does it make, he asks?
Establishment Republicans have tried to counter his appeal by shouting, with growing hysteria, that he isn’t a true conservative. And they’re right, at least as they define conservatism. But their own voters don’t care.
If there’s a puzzle here, it’s why this didn’t happen sooner. One possible explanation is the decadence of the G.O.P. establishment, which has become ingrown and lost touch. Apparatchiks who have spent their whole careers inside the bubble of right-wing think tanks and partisan media may suffer from the delusion that their ideology is actually popular with real people. And this has left them hapless in the face of a Trumpian challenge.
Or maybe the Republicans voters share my belief. Right wing politics, cruel and carnival barking politicians in Texas have led me to redefine what conservative means to me. So far it exemplifies bigotry, narrow-mindedness, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny, and oppression.
Hell no thank you.
Wake up Texas Democrats. For their is a ray of hope for our state’s Party. Let’s get to work.