Here are some of the week’s most notable quotes culled from news reports from across Texas, and beyond.
Virginia delegate and Republican senate candidate Bob Marshall, on why he led the battle against the judicial nomination of an openly gay prosecutor.
Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks never took an oath of office they broke. Sodomy is not a civil right, it’s not the same as the civil rights movement.
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Comments attributed to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in a fundraising letter by the group Citizens United. Huckabee denied that he approved the letter.
President Obama has surrounded himself with morally repugnant political whores with misshapen values and gutter-level ethics.
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Monty Exter, a lobbyist with the Association of Texas Professional Educators, on the fact that so many Texas State Board of Education members are facing a primary election challenge this year.
I think it’s because people are fed up. People have been fed up for the last five to six years.
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The San Antonio Express-News editorial board, announcing the paper’s endorsements for the state board.
The State Board of Education has a high public profile for all the wrong reasons.
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Pat Robertson’s tepid hint at an endorsement of Mitt Romney.
It looks like the people who were worried about his Mormonism, at least that crowd is diminishing somewhat. The question is, if you have two candidates, you don’t have Jesus running against someone else. You have Obama running against Romney.
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Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman.
Patrick Michel’s article about the Texas SBOE is interesting and certainly optimistic about returning some sense of balance and sanity to the board—wherein the kids of Texas and their education take center stage. To this end, I would like to thank all of the sensible, smart, moderate Texas Republican candidates who have entered this race to defeat what I would loosely characterize as the Lost Continent of Atlantis, UFO report, alien abduction, Lost World of Mu, gods from outer space contingent on the Texas SBOE. This is not to say that its members believe in these specific things. However, it is to say that they believe in a broad spectrum of things just as nutty.
But we may have a problem here. Michel’s article is certainly optimistic. However, it may be misplaced optimism, even wishful thinking.
I have been watching the electoral landscape closely this year at all levels of government. Yes, passions run high and crazy in election years, and the greatest hopes of extremist political factions sometimes displace the raw and truthful reality of the political situation on the ground and in the trenches.
With that said, the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, to whom the Texas SBOE extremist faction owes its allegiance, is absolutely giddy with confidence that this is their year to toss the “Muslim citizen of Kenya” out of the White House and thereby save the United States from all of the pain and peril their Ku Klux Klan forbears warned us would ensue from dark-skinned people in positions of high responsibility. While they could have and would have openly said that in 1955, doing so is no longer considered to be either “cool” or “safe” today. Therefore, I just wanted to remind you that this is still what many of them would like to say and what many of them really mean. As for the rest of them, one would be wise to tap the old saying that “you can tell something about who a voter is by the company they keep.”
However, if you are a real Republican extremist, the Obama-Romney race is just a sideshow in 2012. The real source of giddiness lies elsewhere. Here is what I am hearing consistently from the extremists in the Republican Party:
“We made significant inroads in 2010, and 2012 is the year when we are CERTAIN to win it all.”
Now, what do they mean by that? No my friend, they do not mean that they will be getting back to the good old days of Ronnie Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and W. Bush. They view at least two-thirds of that as a time of disaster when their leaders pretended to be “true extremist conservatives” but were really just RINOs in right wing nut job clothing. And yes, Mitt Romney is definitely a RINO pretending to be a true conservative. I know that. You know that. They know that. Every liberal Democrats know that.
The thing that seems to have escaped us all is that the right wing extremist Republican strategy has changed. They no longer really care all that much about the national level politics that has betrayed them for so long. Instead, they have switched to a bottom-up approach. In their new view, the way to win EVERYTHING, even eventually at the long-elusive national level, is to win totally at the local and state levels FIRST. They have also learned that the misguided passions and ignorance of the so-called “common man” can be roped, tied, branded, and bent to do their extremist will much more easily at the local and state levels. This is the real source of their giddiness in 2012. In their minds, this is the year they will finally be in the driver’s seat to take control of everything and everyone—to truly begin transforming the whole of the United States into their idea of a perfect American republic. The only problem for you, me, and most other sane Americans is that their idea of a “perfect American republic” looks an awful lot like Iran, Afghanistan under the Taliban, and North Korea. Ridiculous you say?
Look to Tennessee. It is one of the first places (Oklahoma and Kansas being two lesser others) where this bottom-up strategy is actually working. Tennessee is the state where I grew up, and I have been watching closely the unfolding of this strategy. Virtually the entire state legislature (both houses) is made up of recently elected right wing extremists. Some of these people are so extreme that they would make the conservative extremists on the Texas SBOE look like card-carrying members of the Communist Party. During this past 2011-2012 legislative session, Tennessee began its descent into a new Dark Age with a black platter of new and quite frightening legislation that was passed by incredible majorities, and some of it was actually signed into law by the governor. I cannot go into the details here because it would take too long. Do your own research. Look up “2012 Tennessee legislature” and similar search terms on the Internet and go wherever the clicks lead you.
The right wing extremist Republicans are so giddy because they see 2012 as their grand opportunity to increase these gains at the state and local levels. They do not give a whistle in Dixie about Romney at the national level because their raw meat is at the state and local levels now. This is where their hope for ultimate, total, and final victory lies. I say “final” because our American republic, as our forefathers established it in 1776 and 1787, will cease to exist under these extremists if we allow them to have their way. This is why the Texas SBOE election is so important this year. It exists at the local level. This is where the extremists will be concentrating their efforts, and this is why I am less optimistic than Michel. My sincere hope is that the moderate Republicans in Texas can somehow talk some sense into the average Texas voter.