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Whither Texas...
For the most part, the Lone Star State has only thought it knows where it's going. Where it ends up is mostly an accident, and there's hell to pay along the way.

Hell is very much in the black down here now. A few short years ago, many Americans were all a-twitter, or anyway pretty damned excited that Texas was gonna go blue!

God only knows that I told no end of well-meaning topers in bars from coast to coast, and even points south, that it was going to happen. Many believed me. Now, in the unlikely event my name crosses their mind, they can point to the old Texan who they knew all along was full of it and didn't know a thing about that strange place he came from.

During Beto's first incarnation, they believed me. I came perilously close to believing me too. During that battle with the oleaginous paladin of knavery, Ted Cruz, Beto had his moment. I think even a fair number of Republicans wouldn't have been sad to see Ted go. Of all the old things that obtained in frontier Texas, one of the good ones was that if somebody takes a shot at your spouse, you don't let 'em get away with it. Much less a bloated orange womanizer who probably couldn't fight his way out of a sauna.

Anyway, abject coward and eager lackey that he is, Ted won. And then...Beto lost again. Did you feel a bit worried when he went on his drive-about before announcing his presidential run? Yeah, me too, but I ignored it. I wanted him to be the new Bobby Kennedy. He barely missed hitting the mark when the occasional resident of Cancun and pride of Canada beat him in the Senate race. But Beto was okay at first in the Big Race--but then along came those damn debates, otherwise known as the Democratic single-minded ill-fated and downright stupid stampede to the Left. Even before the "hell yes, we'll take your guns," I knew we were in trouble. Part of it was the rehearsed Spanish statement, carrying the weight of mediocre pronunciation and ponderous pandering. Then he lost out in crossfires with some of the lesser lights on stage. And then, sadly, he began to look like Mr. Smith gone to Washington, except Jimmy Stewart had the scouts on his side. Honestly, I don't think Beto was ready for that level of primetime.

But that doesn't mean Beto isn't, well, Better than Cruz, better than Abbott, and better than anyone else the Dems could have offered up in this the looniest of all campaign years. As bad as the odds are now, somewhere deep inside I still can't believe that half of Texas is really stark raving bonkers and so damn scared of left cultural issues and the declining print runs of the King James Bible that they can vote for a man who is cruel to troubled children, dismissive of a woman's choice in the toughest situation many of them will have, and a panderer to TFG's paranoid vision of brown hordes laying waste to the great Texas desert with their rucksacks and tortillas. And then there's the ineradicable fact that those folks work harder than anyone else, and for less, and do it because they love their families. And one more thing: Note to Abbott and TFG...If you brave souls want to keep undocumented human beings from coming to your pristine lands, levy fines on employers of, say, $50,000 per hire, and see how things go. Oh, you don't want to do that? Ah, I see. Yes, the term is have your demagogic cake and eat it too.

And by the way, wouldn't any normal person take a peek inward when everybody in the whole United States of American thinks we're plumb nuts down here? If this is Texas Exceptionalism, it needs to be in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Trumpian...I mean mental disorders.

​A Blog, or something that might resemble one.

Whither Texas...For the most part, the Lone Star State has only thought it knows where it's going. Where it ends up is mostly an accident, and there's hell to pay along the way.

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A Blog, or something that might resemble one.

Whither Texas...
For the most part, the Lone Star State has only thought it knows where it's going. Where it ends up is mostly an accident, and there's hell to pay along the way.