www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/opinion/afghanistan-us-withdrawal.html
Category: News and Opinion
Are they finally beginning to see the simple truth behind the Big Lie?
‘You’re kidding yourself’: Crenshaw spars with GOP activist who claims 2020 election was stolen https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/gop-activist-dan-crenshaw-election-2020-stolen-16382965.php
Of course Rep. Crenshaw needs to stand by for that much feared call from Trump. But I think they are beginning to think, so what? He’s a loser. And he lost by a sizable margin. That’s beginning to look like the greater threat to their electoral standing.
G-Droppin’ with Greg
Politicians will do crazy things to try to connect with some part of the electorate whose votes they crave but whose life and culture may be foreign to them. The Democratic candidate on their first hunting trip is a favorite. Only Ann Richards was able to pull that one off persuasively. With her big hair, Texas drawl and a deer rifle in her hand, she let them know that she would probably hold her own in a bar fight with any of them two-steppin’ cowboys. And it probably wasn’t her first hunting trip, either.
My all-time favorite was when an incumbent Texas Secretary of Agriculture named Reagan Brown decided that he could connect with Texas’ farmers and ranchers by jamming his hand into a bed of fire ants while the photographers stood by drooling. Cowboy types were not impressed. His opponent wasn’t only a Democrat, he was about as progressive as they come. Thank you, Reagan V. Brown for giving us a few good years with Jim Hightower.
A bit less showy than the faux hunting trips and the fire ant challenge (too bad there were no social media in 1982), there is the practice of what I call G-droppin’. Candidates for statewide and national offices typically have been educated with bachelor’s and law degrees, often from Ivy League schools. They have learned how to speak proper English and they speak it with a precision that often makes their home folks think of them as “puttin’ on airs.” Put these folks in front of a judge in a courtroom and they speak the king’s English.
But a roomful of voters at the American Legion Hall in Clute will have them droppin’ Gs from their present participles. Even President Obama did it. He dropped Gs with the worst of them. But it never sold the way Ann Richards sold her NRA-appealing hunting trips. With Obama, the G-droppin’ seemed like the opposite of puttin’ on airs, at least to me. He was just too honest and too good for that kind of panderin’ to the willfully ignorant. It never seemed natural.
But Greg Abbot has handed me one that tops the Reagan Brown performance. But there is no way that I can wring any humor from it.
In order to establish kinship with folks in the Trump cult, he has endangered all our lives and put our children at the head of the line. By issuing an executive order forbidding local governments from mandating masks and vaccines, he no doubt hopes he will be able to pick up the support of the leftover dregs of the Trump “base” in Texas. And as the evidence builds that his edict is probably going to cost lives and create more drag on the economy, he does what DJT would do. He doubles down. How utterly stupid and mean.
Fortunately there are some leaders at the local level who aren’t having any of it. Call it civil disobedience. Call it leadership. They see their jobs as protecting their citizens. Lina Hidalgo’s doin’ it. Sylvester Turner’s doin’ it. Some school districts are doin’ it, too.
In your face, *re* Abbott.
Trumpies: Go Get Vaccinated. We Love You Enough to Want to Keep You Alive and Voting.
www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/opinion/covid-vaccine-safety.html
This op/ed by Alex Azar, Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, should be all the encouragement you need. If you are eligible and have been hesitant or resisting vaccination against Covid 19, take it from the Trump administration official who led Operation Warp Speed, you need to do this for yourself, your family, your local health care workers, your party and your country.
And that part about keeping you voting? Of course I want to keep you voting. I would prefer it if you voted for someone committed to democratic values and the rule of law, but if you can’t do that, I will.
I will also always support any legislation that protects your right to vote and keeps the ballot box accessible for you.
So, do the same for me, please. And get a shot.
Mimi Swartz in the New York Times, on Texas and the Tragic Product of Governance among the Uneducated
Rage and Rampage: Is It Really About Mental Health?
Friday night, Brazosport Center Stages opened its production of “An Iliad,” a play by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare. The play is an examination of the hold of rage over humankind and its expression throughout history as lust for war and blood. The opening night performance was provided with eerily apt real-life bookends by mass murderers in Atlanta and Boulder, one three days before our play opened and the next three days after.
Not the same, you say. One person with an automatic weapon is not the same as a war that pits populations against one another with all the force of their intelligence, technology, industry and wealth. I grant you that, in its scale, it is not the same. But the fundamental driving power of rage is the same.
In the case of the single shooter with the automatic weapon, he feels empowered to do what only armies could do in the past. And his weapon is the product of his society’s technology and wealth. (I considered the pronoun and I’m sorry to say for mass killings the masculine seldom fails.)
The New York Times offers a study that shows an undeniable connection between the availability of guns and mass killing. And the phenomenon is global. Societies with more guns produce more mass shootings.
After mass killings there is inevitably discussion of mental health as a possible factor. Of course, sick people sometimes do evil things. But it is our collective mental health that seems to be the problem. If there can be such a thing as societal or national mental health, perhaps the mental health argument makes sense.
In that case, we might say that a nation is insane when it produces large quantities of weapons of war and makes them easily available and, in fact, guarantees them as a right. Will the Second Amendment be read by our now right-wing court to guarantee the right to own and drive around in a military tank?
Imagine if the nut groups that invaded the Capitol on January 6 had crowd funded the purchase of a few tanks? How better to express one’s rage than with a few old German battle tanks? That, of course, would require a more expansive reading of the constitution but our court as it now stands seems up to the job.
Meanwhile, we go about our days. I have grandchildren who live less than a mile from the King Soopers store where ten people died this Monday (March 22). It has been their family’s regular shopping spot for ten years.
Now their parents have the job of trying to explain what has happened, to make them feel safe, to inspire in them the courage to live their lives, and to help them understand what must be done to reclaim their country as a desirable place to live and raise their children someday. I do not envy them the task.
South of Town: Notes and Scenes from Texas' Upper Gulf Coast 