1. United States
2. Texas
3. Letter

Poor Texas. Is it still the Great State of? It was once a state of frontier independence. Resistant to being told what to do. Fighting against overwhelming odds to live free. Determined to be no one’s lackey. Say goodbye to all that. All it took was one Yankee carpetbagger from Queens, NYC to erase that fabled history. And it was so easily done. GOP politics and politicians made Texas bow down. For what? Now the GOP establishment seems somehow befuddled by Ken Paxton’s defeat of John Cornyn in this week’s Texas primary. As if the last decade hasn’t been spent trying to elevate the worst tendencies of humankind into a metric of American success. The basest among us are now our heroes. The ruder, the better. The smaller and more vile the words, the better. Insults have become a governing philosophy. And turning constituents against one another, and cheating, is deemed the only way to win at the ballot box. So why wouldn’t we now have a GOP candidate for the US Senate exactly like Ken Paxton? This is the moment he’s been waiting for. And that the GOP allowed to happen. Encouraged to happen. And now the GOP is represented by the worst among them. So please save the disconcerted surprise. Now we get to have a guy that, as soon as he took office as Texas AG, was indicted on charges of felony securities fraud. With the case ending in March 2024 with an agreement that Paxton would pay restitution and complete community service. In 2020, Paxton’s top aides reported him to the FBI for abusing his office. He fired four of them. A judge later agreed they were fired improperly and awarded them $6.6M. In 2023 the Texas House, dominated by Republicans, impeached Paxton on a bipartisan vote. But, bowing down under pressure from Trump, the Texas senate acquitted him. And then last year his wife, state senator Angela Paxton, filed for divorce on “biblical grounds.” Or in layman’s terms…adultery. Paxton is the Texas version of our current president. So of course he’s going to endorse and encourage him. John Cornyn didn’t stand a chance. It seems he couldn’t authentically overcome his tendency towards decency. And learned it doesn’t matter how much you kiss the ring, you’ll end up under that bus eventually. So when we start to hear Paxton calling his Democratic opponent James Talarico ‘a threat to everything we hold dear in this state and in this country’ just call it what it is…projecting. There are more decent people in Texas than not. Here’s hoping that’s what they vote for in November. Decency.