As Donald Trump continues to put together his all-star squad of one percent super villains, it is hard to keep up with the breadth of apocalyptic stupidity that each and every appointment has shown in their professional lives. Texas Agricultural Commissioner Sid Miller is reportedly on the short list for Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture position. If you don’t know who Sid Miller is, pretend Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam and Boss Hog had a child and then that child became the Agricultural Commissioner of Texas. Miller is most recently known for having to pay back money to Texas when he used official business to coincide with traveling to Oklahoma where he received something called a “Jesus shot” for pain. By Republican standards of ethics these days that doesn’t seem to even rank. More recently, Miller’s social media presence has come under fire. Like the time he compared Syrian refugees with rattlesnakes on his Facebook account. The Texas Tribune looked through some more of Mr. Miller’s Facebook feed and found that Miller loves to post bullshit lies to his over 332,000 followers.
A Texas Tribune analysis of a portion of Miller's social media history identified 10 postings of demonstrably false, misleading or unsupported information. The information most often came in the form of a link to an obscure ultra-conservative website posted with commentary from Miller. Some of these posts dated back to late 2014, when Miller was campaigning for his current job. Others were far more recent, including the headline of an apocryphal story about pop star Lady Gaga that he posted last week (see below). As of Friday evening, it had generated 309 comments and 210 shares on Facebook.
Miller has an active Facebook account the same way that Donald Trump has an active Twitter account—nausea-producing. He has posted all kinds of crazy stories, but here’s an example.
This is a made up story. Sid Miller introduces it on his page saying:
Friends, this is too close to home—Brazoria County, Texas! I have been warning my fellow Texans to be alert and for good reason. The FBI says that it cannot act on this “alleged” terror training compound because the U.S. State Department has not yet declared the group that runs it--:Muslims in America—as a terrorist organization. All the while they prepare for their jihad against out state and nation. I urge Governor Perry and the Texas Rangers to do what the State Department and FBI wont and that is to arrest these home-grown terrorists and charge them with any and all applicable state criminal law violations.
The Washington Post has a good breakdown of how batshit insane this story is if you want to go down the dung-riddled rabbit hole of right-wing conspiracists. Well, the Tribune asked Mr. Miller about the piles of lies he’s pushed over the years on social media and this is what he had to say:
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller suggested Wednesday that journalists were unfair to scrutinize his habit of posting fabricated or unsupported information on social media. And he doesn’t “spend a lot of time worrying that much” about whether what his postings are true.
“I’m not a news organization,” Miller told Nathan Bernier, a reporter for Austin-based KUT News. “Y’all are holding me to the same standards as you are a news organization, and it’s just Facebook.”
We are talking about stories like the Communist Party of the United States endorsing Hillary Clinton (didn’t happen and I apologize to any communists who took a shock there). Sid Miller may become our next Secretary of Agriculture but he’ll always be a lying rat bastard to me.