As neither Greg Abbott nor Wendy Davis have any primary problems, it is the race for Lt Governor that is taking up all the political oxygen down here, mainly due to State Senator Dan Patrick.
Dan Patrick went from bar owner to owning the two biggest radio talkshow stations in Texas where he has spent the last twenty years – and still at it everyday – as the primer Right-wing talkshow host of Texas. He is now a multi-millionaire state senator with his eyes on the Governor’s mansion and beyond.
Patrick is an Evangelical Fundamentalist, rabid Pro Life, NRA Republican. I once heard him on the radio suggest that both President Clinton AND First Lady Hillary Clinton be executed for treason.
The other three candidates for Lt Governor are Texas establishment Republicans: Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples, Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and present Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst (you will remember Dewhurst lost his Senate race to Ted Cruz.) Dan Patrick has caused the other three candidates to fall all over themselves trying to out NRA, out Tea Party, out Obama hate, out homophobe and out anti immigration Dan Patrick. It has become the ugliest right-wing circus since the 2012 GOP Primaries.
If you read much of this website you know I often get into the what KIND OF PEOPLE Republicans are, never a pretty picture. Yesterday I found this editorial from the Houston Chronicle (Republican Lite) staff that sends my message in a more acceptable journalistic manner.
The lawyer’s question had to do with defining the good life, and the teacher’s answer included, in part, the admonition to love one’s neighbor.
So, who is my neighbor? The prideful lawyer wanted to know. In response, the teacher told a story: A certain man was going down from Houston to the Rio Grande Valley to visit his ailing mother, who lived across the river in a foreign land. Coming back, he knew, would be dangerous, because he lacked appropriate papers. He ran the risk of being jailed, deported. By chance, two men of respectability were going down that way, but given the man’s illegal immigrant status, both passed by on the other side. But a certain Houston bar owner – actually, the man’s boss – was moved with compassion and offered to drive the man back to Houston if he made it back across the river. Now which of these three, the teacher asked, was a neighbor to him who needed help visiting his ailing mother?
Who could have guessed that three decades later, the “neighbor” would find himself pilloried by his political cohorts for his act of kindness? Or that he would deny it ever happened? Or that this Houston “good Samaritan” would be spending millions of dollars desperately trying to convince Republican primary voters that he would never, ever be guilty of acting kindly toward the undocumented among us.
State Sen. Dan Patrick, now in a hard-fought primary race for lieutenant governor, may or may not have helped out his undocumented employee. But what could be more unseemly – unneighborly – than Patrick’s campaign strategy of scapegoating hardworking men and women like his former employee, now a naturalized U.S. citizen, as dangerous, disease-carrying aliens? Almost as odious is the effort by Patrick’s opponents to lay him low by charging that he once acted compassionately. These self-professed godly men might remember that a certain teacher who told a similar story two millennia ago also had some pointed things to say about hypocrisy.