[Vision2020] For God, Texas and Golf

[Art Deco]

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August 1, 2012
For God, Texas and Golf By GAIL
COLLINS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/gailcollins/index.html>

Texas Republicans have just nominated a Senate candidate who is promising
to protect America’s golf courses from the United Nations.

This is not actually the most important point about Ted Cruz, the Tea Party
favorite who scored a dramatic upset victory over the state’s lieutenant
governor on Tuesday. But we don’t really need to go over his basic agenda
because you can pretty much guess it. (Hint: *
cutspendingshrinkgovernmentrepealObamacare.*) Also, he memorized the
Constitution in high school. And he wants to abolish the Internal Revenue
Service.

But about golf: In a blog posting early this year, Cruz vowed that as
senator he would fight against “a dangerous United Nations plan” on
environmental sustainability that he said was aimed at abolishing “golf
courses, grazing pastures and paved roads.” He blamed all this on the
Democratic financier-philanthropist George Soros.

While I could personally look with equanimity upon the idea of a world
without golf courses, the thing Cruz was talking about is actually a vague,
nonbinding resolution that’s more than 20 years old.

The Senate seat in question is currently held by Kay Bailey Hutchison, a
politically conservative and emotionally moderate Republican who liked
working on undramatic issues like aviation safety. Cruz’s victory was the
latest in a number of Tea Party triumphs in Republican primaries, and it
certainly does suggest that next year the Republican Senate contingent will
be composed almost entirely of right-wing purists and people who are afraid
they’re going to be primaried by a right-wing purist.

It’s so ironic, people. The national electorate is totally turned off by
partisan standoffs. You can almost hear the public imploring, *will you
guys please just make some back-room deals?* And, at that same moment, the
Republican candidates are being pushed into being more and more
intractable.

Cruz will now run this fall against Paul Sadler, the Democratic nominee,
who says that since Tuesday he’s been getting an “unbelievable” number of
calls from people offering support and money. That would be a good thing
because Sadler’s campaign war chest was previously the size of a piggy
bank.

If Cruz wins the seat, he’d be the third Hispanic member of the Senate —
two of them Republican, all of them Cuban-American. Perhaps it was a
coincidence that just as he was cruising to victory, the Democrats
announced that Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio would be the keynote
speaker at their convention. Castro is the 37-year-old son of a single
mother whose twin brother, Joaquín, is a state legislator currently running
for a safe Democratic seat in Congress.

*Take that, Republicans! We’ll see you one Cuban-American Harvard Law
graduate who memorized the Constitution when he was in high school and
raise you Mexican-American twins who went to Harvard Law and got elected
mayor and state representative! *The race for the Hispanic vote goes on,
and we will try to avoid mentioning that virtually the only thing all three
of these people have in common is an inability to speak fluent Spanish.

Texas money and Texas politicians helped create the Tea Party movement, and
the state does tend to treasure the extreme. The current Republican state
platform calls for an end to the teaching of “critical thinking” in public
schools. In the Texas primary this week, a member of the State Supreme
Court lost renomination to a former county judge who had made his name
fighting for the right to work in a courtroom with a picture of the Ten
Commandments on the wall and a monument to the Bible in the front yard.

There’s always been a strong antigovernment strain in Texas politics, which
seems to have something to do with Texans being obsessed with the fact that
their state was once an independent republic. “We are very proud of our
Texas history,” Gov. Rick Perry once said. “People discuss and debate the
issues of can we break ourselves into five states, can we secede, a lot of
interesting things that I’m sure Oklahoma and Pennsylvania would love to be
able to say about their states, but, the fact is, they can’t. Because
they’re not Texas.” He was totally *stunned* when it turned out that nobody
wanted to nominate him for president.

But even Perry was supporting Cruz’s opponent, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, who
represented the traditional Texas Republican business establishment.
(Dewhurst himself has a Mitt Romney-sized fortune.) But he turned out to be
a terrible debater and lethargic campaigner. His platform was basically the
same as Cruz’s, although with a slightly shorter list of federal agencies
to abolish.

Maybe the real answer to this and all the other Tea
Party-over-establishment upsets is that the traditional Republican party is
just burned out, and devoid of fresh faces. It’s either that or the golf
course peril.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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