Every time the Texas Republican Party successfully hoists up the most insane person in the state for some public office—looking at you, Gov. Abbott—they appear to then get together in the same backroom to launch a new search for someone crazier. How else to explain the continued campaign of a certain Mary Lou Bruner for—God help us—the Texas Board of Education?
Comments she made recently to a group of superintendents referencing questionable statistics and non-existent meetings with school officials have provided the only glimmer of hope for her opponents that she could be defeated in the runoff election Tuesday.
Bruner, a 68-year-old retired teacher who has never held public office before, earned 48 percent of the vote in the March primary with fierce anti-Common Core rhetoric and a call for "truth in education not political correctness." In a February open letter on her campaign website, Bruner proposed a return to the basics like phonics, cursive, and times tables, which her Republican runoff opponent, Keven Ellis, has pointed out are already included in the state curriculum.
Now, here's the thing: Bruner railing against a supposed liberal assault on America's times tables is not even one-tenth of the nuttiest things she has, in the last year, railed against. We have covered Mary Lou Bruner before, because she is completely freaking insane.
To give a very, very incomplete rundown: She's positive Barack Obama used to be a gay prostitute who's hiding his gay-ness. She's convinced climate change is a hoax invented by Karl Marx to cripple capitalism. She believes school shootings happen because schools don't let children pray anymore and teachers started criticizing the Founding Fathers. She believes the Democratic Party offed JFK for being too conservative. She believes preschools are a plot to turn our children gay.
Wednesday, May 25, 2016 · 2:42:41 AM +00:00
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Barbara Morrill
Huzzah! There is some hope for America. The nutcase lost:
A Texas education board candidate who believes dinosaurs walked the Earth with humans has lost in a runoff election.
Mary Lou Bruner's defeat Tuesday followed heightened attention over old Facebook posts in which she claimed President Barack Obama was gay prostitute and suggested that Democrats assassinated John F. Kennedy.
Those aren't the standard, run-of-the-mill oddities like "there were dinosaurs on Noah's Ark" or "Islam isn't a real religion," both of which are also planks on the Mary Lou raft. These go above and beyond those now-common conservative Republican refrains.
And so for all of this, she has been given the support of the Texas tea party movement, a group whose hostility toward Obama is beaten only by its hostility toward anything resembling bein' educated. Electing a genuine conspiracy-babbling lunatic to be in charge of the state's schools is, to them, apparently a damn fine idea. Bruner continues her runaway carnival ride of a campaign, merrily unfazed by occasional scrapes with reality.
The only crack that has formed in Bruner's stronghold on the race is a recent meeting with a group of East Texas superintendents that went off the rails. During her speech to the superintendents, Bruner cited incorrect statistics, drawing protests from the audience. [...]
And when Bruner claimed that she met with the superintendent of the Mineola school district, that superintendent stood up and told the crowd that the two had not in fact had a meeting.
The statistics bit Bruner was able to brush off as a misunderstanding. Inventing a meeting with someone who vows they've never met with her, however? That may qualify her to be Donald Trump's vice president.
She is expected to win her runoff, because Texas Republicans are absolute lunatics. No longer content to hoist up your Steve Stockmans or Ted Cruzii, they've stitched together an artificial human being from a collection of old Breitbart comment threads and online advertisements for survival food, and are running that for office. It’s likely the whole damn state party may have gotten into some bad chocolate.