TIM DUNN & FARRIS WILKS

Greetings. I am a voting constituent in rural west Texas. Ahhhh…the light bulb over my head is getting brighter. Lots of news the past few days examining a large part of the reason Texas has lost its mind politically in recent years. Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. I’m sure you know them based on media coverage. Check your campaign contributions. A Texas oligarchy in action. Gigantic pay-for-play. Give big money to folks willing to advance their donors’ own particular medieval version of extreme. Wind em up and watch em go. The CNN Special “Deep in the Pockets of Texas” was a crash course in how they work. And the pie charts showing the proportion of donations from the duo show how, without their money injection, the likelihood of many of these folks going anywhere politically was unlikely. Unless you are a voter who takes the time to do due diligence on candidate research, you can be easily led to vote for someone who wants to tear down the very systems Americans believe in. It’s insidious. Texas leads the way in nefarious big money manipulation of politics. But it’s also good to read that money can’t always buy a candidate’s entry into the political world. A bad candidate is a bad candidate no matter how you gussy them up. Mostly. Enough slip through to keep our state a laughingstock. But it’s not laughable. It’s frightening. However, I personally am gratified that Texas’s sausage making is now being exposed more widely. And as I read in an article today, folks like this with more money than is good for them (and us) “should be raving into dust clouds on some street corner in San Angelo and not enabling mobs who give hell to middle school librarians in New Jersey.” What kind of politician wants to be beholden like this? Oh. Wait. Never mind.