"Chickens for Colonel Sanders", Houston chapter

"Roaches for Raid" is really more precise.  I appreciate Chris Busby's struggles, but I have seen this movie before, and it always ends the same way.

Politics these days is often about black and white, or more accurately, red and blue. Saviors and demons. Labels, not issues. Sound bites, not sound ideas. Falling in line. Or falling out of favor.

And then you have Chris Busby.

[...]

At the University of Houston, the political junkie aligned with the Democratic Party, mostly because of gay rights. He voted for President Barack Obama in 2008, but the stimulus and his disagreement with much of the party platform led to a break from politics.

Then, after the local chapter of the gay-friendly Log Cabin Republicans collapsed, Busby says he decided to help resurrect it. He doesn't agree with every popular Republican stance. On fiscal issues and guns, he's firmly on the right. But he's against the death penalty because he believes it can't be administered fairly. He opposes abortion rights but will back candidates, such as state Rep. Sarah Davis, who do support abortion rights.

Yeah, Busby and I agree on breaking with Obama but probably disagree on the specifics; I thought the stimulus was much too small to be effective.  And we could start and end with the hypocrisy of a person fighting for his own marriage rights while opposing reproductive choice for women, but there's lots of layers to this stinky little onion.

The obvious question for Busby is why he wants to align himself with a party full of so many people who don't want him - a party that, once again this year, denied Log Cabin Republicans a booth at the ongoing state convention in Fort Worth.

He has plenty of answers. One he delivered with a chuckle: "There is a much greater chance in my opinion that the work I do in the Republican Party will eventually change the party's stance to be more equal and open than my participation in the Democrat Party would ever bring about a balanced budget."

Ha Ha Ha.

He says the Bible-thumpers don't bother him. As a young man struggling with his sexuality he found only strength in his Christian faith.

"I've never been a literalist," he said, explaining that Jesus' message of love resonates with him more powerfully than Leviticus' instructions on shellfish and the passages on homosexuality.

"There's just never been in my life any reason to think that two men or two women falling in love is anything that approaches wrong," he says.

And he says there are plenty of Republicans, especially the ones under 40, who agree with him.

Sure, "it's disheartening," Busby says, that Texas Attorney General and Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott has vowed to defend Texas' gay marriage ban. But, Busby will support Abbott because he believes he'd do a better job than Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis.

What a thoughtful paradox this young man is.  Meanwhile, in Fort Worth...

The Texas Republican Party would endorse psychological treatment that seeks to turn gay people straight under a new platform partly aimed at rebuking laws in California and New Jersey that ban so-called "reparative therapy" on minors.

A push to include the new anti-gay language survived a key vote late Thursday in Fort Worth at the Texas Republican Convention where, across the street, tea party star U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz fired up attendees at a rally to defend marriage as between a man and a woman.

Under the new proposed plank, the Texas GOP will "recognize the legitimacy and efficacy of counseling, which offers reparative therapy and treatment for those patients seeking healing and wholeness from their homosexual lifestyle."

Restorative, reparative, conversion therapy -- whatever name it goes by these days -- has been completely discredited in the scientific community.  But why would science be persuasive in any conceivable way to Texas Republican convention delegates?

Gay conservatives in Texas could still emerge with a rare victory on a separate issue: removing decades-old platform language that states, "Homosexuality tears at the fabric of society." Stripping that phrasing survived a sometimes-tense challenge from hardliners who not only wanted to preserve it, but wanted to replace "homosexuality" with "sexual sins."

"I really beg my social conservative colleagues to let this issue go," said Rudy Oeftering, a Dallas businessman and vice president of the gay Republican group Metroplex Republicans. "It's your opinion. It's your belief — but it's my life."

If that's considered a victory for the tolerant among the GOP faithful...

As for Delegate Oeftering, he appears to have committed the unpardonable sin of employing the Annise Parker rationale in his argument.  Take him outside the hall and stone him to death.

Honestly, I don't think every single LGBTQ needs to be a Democrat.  There's plenty of room in the Green and Libertarian parties for them to feel welcome.  In fact there are leadership positions available.

But any non-straight person who's voting for Republicans anywhere on the ballot needs to have their head examined (pun in-fucking-tended).  This is the most pathetic, self-loathing, glaring, obvious, against-your-own-self-interest political action that a person can take.  In context, you can almost understand why economically struggling suburbanites buy into the conservative fantasy of tax cuts stimulating job creation.

Not quite, but almost.

It would make more sense as a declarative statement if Busby ate one of his guns in the middle of Richmond Avenue, outside the Harris County Republican headquarters, than it would be to vote for their candidates.

I don't want to imply that Busby should commit suicide over his political cognitive dissonance.  He should however come to his senses about it.

Chris Busby is not ever going to influence anything in any measurable way in the TXGOP.  It's never going to happen.  Never, ever.  Thinking that he can, or will, or even might in the smallest measure is the epitome of delusional behavior.  And I hope someone shakes him awake, sooner than later.

Anniversaries

-- The 70th, of the D-Day invasion of Europe, which for this nation began on France's beaches.

Seventy years after Allied troops stormed the beaches at Normandy, President Barack Obama returned Friday to this hallowed battleground in what he called a "powerful manifestation of America's commitment to human freedom" that lives on in a new generation.

"Our commitment to liberty, our claim to equality, our claim to freedom and to the inherent dignity of every human being — that claim is written in the blood on these beaches, and it will endure for eternity," Obama said on a morning that dawned glorious and bright over the sacred site he called "democracy's beachhead."

You'd have thought that resentful conservatives who chose to throw tomatoes at Bowe Bergdahl and his family could have at least looked at a freaking calendar, and perhaps come to the conclusion that the timing of their assault on decency -- between Memorial Day and this day -- was poorly planned.

But no.

-- The 45th, of Houston's Intercontinental airport.

(It) was promoted as the "world's first supersonic jet airport" and one "so big it will have electronic trains to speed passengers between connecting flights." A local magazine, looking back on the opening a year later, said it represented "tomorrow's aviation."

[...]

David Robertson, then 5 but destined to work for the local airport system one day, remembers standing on the observation deck during his tour of the new complex, which had two terminals in the middle of a former cow pasture in an undeveloped area in north Houston.

"We were so excited to see the airport," he said. "It resembled to me, as a kid, what space stations would look like."

A month before Apollo 11 reached the moon under the guidance of Mission Control in Houston, space exploration was on the young man's mind as he toured the lobbies, with sleek black and white color schemes, and the mod furniture in the waiting rooms and baggage areas. He was impressed by the underground train that connected the terminals.

"In the late 1960s, there was still an element of fascination with flying," he said. "I thought by the time I was a teenager I'd be making space trips to the moon. I was sure that's where we were heading."

I can't get over those wide open spaces in the parking lots.

We flew out of Intercontinental a few years after its grand opening on a family vacation to Orlando and Disney World, a period in time when people wore their Sunday best on airplanes, and when -- because there was no such thing as credit cards -- everybody showed up at the airport to pay for their flight with a walletful of hundred dollar bills.

It was a different world.

Conservatives plumb new low in disgraceful attacks on Bergdahl, family

This is as miserable and sorry as they have ever been.  I'm sure they can find a way to dig deeper at some point, but for now... congratulations, assholes.  You've hit the depths of the Mariana Trench.

When an emotional Jani and Robert Bergdahl strode into the White House Rose Garden on Saturday to the share the emotional announcement by President Obama that their son, Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl would be returning home after being held captive for five years by the Taliban, it's unlikely they could have foreseen that their family would soon be under  attack by the right-wing media, or that Robert Bergdahl would be depicted on Fox News as a possible terrorist sympathizer; mocked on national television as he awaited a reunion with his ailing son.

They couldn't have foreseen it because I don't think it's ever happened before. I don't think we've ever seen a dedicated media campaign to not only undermine a returning prisoner of war, but to also cast doubt onto the soldier's family; to portray them as un-American even as they prepare for their reunion.

Instead, Fox News has helped transform the prisoner swap involving Taliban detainees into "an increasingly vicious partisan issue," as Buzzfeed described the Republican decision to go into  relentless attack mode, complete with enlisted publicists and strategists, to subvert the return of an American POW.

It's symptomatic of a conservative media mini-mob that now obsessively politicizing everything, and does it all with the knob turned up to 11. 

There was no epithet left wanting, no smear unused.

(T)his was a typical headline from one right-wing site this week: "Bergdahl: From POW to POS?", while The Drudge Report condemned the soldier as a "rat." As blogger Charles Johnson noted, by Tuesday, conservatives at Hot Air and Breitbart had posted no less than 42 Bergdahl items/rants between them. 

On Fox, the debate over whether Bergdahl deserted his post had long ago been settled, so they quickly moved onto the next phase of the campaign, which was suggesting, without any proof, that the U.S. soldier was actually a Taliban sympathizer who might have fought against American forces. "Can you imagine if it turns out that he was actually collaborating," Brian Kilmeade wondered out loud on Fox.

They went after his father's beard, for fuck's sake.

That mindset begins to explain why Kilmeade talked about Bowe Bergdahl's father this way:

I mean, he says he was growing his beard because his son was -- because his son was in captivity. Your son's out now. If you really don't, no longer want to look like a member of the Taliban, you don't have to look like a member of the Taliban. Are you out of razors?

The phrase 'dripping with contempt' barely covers the tasteless attack Kilmeade launched against a father who'd just spent every day of the previous five years trying to secure his son's release. For Fox talkers, that human element is irrelevant.

Meanwhile, Fox contributor Laura Ingraham stressed "More revelations coming out about the left-wing father of Sergeant Bergdahl I mean, left wing doesn't even begin to describe him." So being 'left wing' means you should be mocked while you await your son's return from a Taliban prison?

Taking the cue from the douchebags in conservative media, the Republick politicians sprayed Axe all over themselves to try to mask the foul odor of their reeking hypocrisy.

Recall that Republican Senators John McCain and Kelly Ayotte were in favor of bringing Bergdahl home -- until President Obama achieved it. In December, Allen West sneered that the Obama wasn't working hard enough to recover Bergdahl because there were "no camera highlights in it for him"; now that Obama has done so, West says he should be impeached.

So for the ODS sufferers, it's a win-win.  They get to attack Obama for securing a POW's release when they would have been able to attack Obama for leaving a POW behind, or die in custody, if he had not acted.

There may never be a more disgraceful moment for Republicans and conservatives than how they have treated Bowe Bergdahl and his family.  Unfortunately for all of us, however, the worst conservatives in the nation are holding their state convention in Dallas this weekend, and we should expect a rousing game of "Hey, watch this!" from them.  A showdown between the Open Carry Texas goons and the RPT security team assigned to keep them out?  More Abortion Barbie posters?

Use you imagination.  How much lower can Texas Republicans go, with the bar now set in the gutter?  Wading into the sewer isn't beneath them, as they have shown us before.  Septic tank dive, anyone?

Update: Said with a bit more incredulousness than me.

So much to blog about, so little time

-- The Benghazi-to-Bergdahl transmogrification of conservative outrage is complete.  Obama is now apologizing to senior members of Congress for doing what Bush did over 500 times, what Reagan did with 1500 missiles that went to Nicaraguan rebels in exchange for three Iranian hostages, and what Nixon did for Vietnam POWs, one of whom was an alleged Viet Cong collaborator named John McCain.

When they attacked Bergdahl's father for growing a beard -- this from the same people who worship the facial follicles of the Duck Dynasty crew -- my spin meter broke.

The stench of this latest Republican hypocrisy is just overwhelming.

Update: And people say I'm the one who's angry.

-- Speaking of extremist conservative hypocrites, the NRA crawfished on their denunciation of the Open Carry Texas freaks.  That brief moment of sanity was nice while it lasted.

-- Not content with quiet civilian life, Tom DeLay makes news again.  Oh, how we have missed him.

-- Maureen Dowd ate an entire marijuana candy bar -- it should have been sectioned into 16ths for "novices", but she said that wasn't printed on the label -- and suffered a bad trip.  No, really.

-- The NSA can hax all your I-Phones (even when you have turned them off), can haz all your data, can destroy it if they get caught.  But hey, why worry if you've got nothing to hide?

Send me a postcard from Gitmo, wouldja?  I'm sure you'll eventually be swapped out for bin Laden's driver, or somebody dangerous.  Just ask your dad not to grow a beard and you might not suffer any 'coming home' retribution from the real patriots.

Weekend with Ted

Not such an excellent adventure.  I'm certain he feels otherwise, though.  Our little junior in the Senate, Ted "Poop" Cruz, won a straw vote taken among his core -- the looniest of the loony -- then went on This Weak with George Snuffleluffagus and preened.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, didn’t waste any time relaxing this weekend.

The junior senator and potential 2016 presidential contender appeared first at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans Saturday and then in a televised interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC Sunday night.

In New Orleans, Cruz, the pride of the Tea Party, appealed to the Southern conservative crowd, winning the conference’s presidential straw poll with over 30 percent of the vote. Dr. Ben Carson, a Fox news commentator, trailed close behind with just over 29 percent, but Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., won only 10 percent of the vote and Gov. Rick Perry won even less with five percent.

[...]

On Sunday, in an interview on ABC’s “This Week, ” Stephanopoulos pressed Cruz for information on his potential presidential bid and asked whether furthering factions in the Republican Party is the best strategy for winning the White House in 2016.

Cruz said strategies from 2010 and 1980 are examples of what Republicans need to do to maintain power in the House in 2014.

“The way we win…is drawing a line in the sand, standing for principle, drawing a clear distinction and making the case to the American people that an election matters,” he said.

Te Cruz is running for president?  Hadn't heard that before. *yawn*

David Denby at the New Yorker has him pretty well pegged, and not just his visage.

When Ted Cruz lies, he appears to be praying. His lips narrow, almost disappearing into his face, and his eyebrows shift abruptly, rising like a drawbridge on his forehead into matching acute angles. He attains an appearance of supplication, an earnest desire that men and women need to listen, as God surely listens. Cruz has large ears; a straight nose with a fleshy tip, which shines in camera lights when he talks to reporters; straight black hair slicked back from his forehead like flattened licorice; thin lips; a long jaw with another knob of flesh at the base, also shiny in the lights. If, as Orwell said, everyone has the face he deserves at fifty, Cruz, who is only forty-two, has got a serious head start. For months, I sensed vaguely that he reminded me of someone but I couldn’t place who it was. Revelation has arrived: Ted Cruz resembles the Bill Murray of a quarter-century ago, when he played fishy, mock-sincere fakers. No one looked more untrustworthy than Bill Murray. The difference between the two men is that the actor was a satirist.

It gets less personal and more better.

He seeks the Presidency, of course. And he appears to be doing it by sowing as much confusion and disorder as possible—playing the joker in a seemingly nihilistic charade whose actual intent is a rational grab for power. Does he have a chance? One wonders about his supporters. Are they in on the joke, aware that his concern is a mask? Or do they take him literally, as a truth-teller and a prophet? Are they cynics or true believers? If they are cynics, he will fail; if they are true believers, he could go very far, expanding his support in a messianic crusade, a quest to purify and redeem the nation.

Prior to the next election, Democrats can’t do much to deter him. They may hope that he continues his rampage, turning off big money and more and more of the electorate. His immediate threat, obviously, is to moderate Republicans. If he continues to blaze, they will be consumed. Then again, there is another side to the Joseph McCarthy story. After going too far—attacking the Army, in 1953 and 1954—McCarthy was censured by the Senate, in December, 1954. (He died less than three years later, of liver problems, at the age of forty-eight.) When the mask of sincerity gets smashed, the man wearing it may break apart, too.

2016 will be really fun if the Republicks nominate Cruz.  I just don't think they will do so.

Update: The TXGOP has selected Rand Paul as their keynoter at this weekend's state convention.  Both Cruz and Rick Perry will also address delegates with floor speeches.

Update II: In Senate hearings this morning regarding a potential amendment reversing Citizens United, Cruz accused "liberals" of attacking the First Amendment.  This is the grandest of political theater: Democrats in the Senate hold hearings on something they know will never pass -- really; it's the equivalent of House investigations into Benghazi or repealing Obamacare -- and Republicans moan and cry and then twist it into something completely ridiculous.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance celebrates the passage of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff tries to figure out what the runoff results might mean for November.

Libby Shaw at Texas Kaos is disgusted by the gutter campaign tactics employed by Republicans during this election cycle. Where are the issues? Texas GOP: No Blow is too Low. Bring on the Boats, Hoes and Abortion Barbie.

Letters from Texas contemplates the existential dilemma of Log Cabin Republicans.

Horwitz at Texpatriate laments the state of Texas after Dan Patrick moves one step closer to the Lieutenant Governor's office.

How much does it cost for Greg Abbott to change his mind? PDiddie at Brains and Eggs is glad you asked! That's on sale right now for $350,000, and if you buy before the end of the month, he might be flexible on the price.

After a landmark week in local politics, Texas Leftist shares the true importance of passing the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance. It's not just about preventing discrimination; HERO actually makes Houston a safer city as well.

WCNews at Eye on Williamson points out that Congressman John Carter (R-Round Rock) didn't care about the problems at the VA until he thought he could score political points with them: Carter knew about VA problems back in 2012.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wonders if your local paper was pushing the propaganda for the energy oligarchs. The Dallas Morning News, as well as others, did.

Neil at All People Have Value offered support to folks protesting against the huge amount of wasted money being spent on World Cup soccer in Brazil while basic needs go unmet. Neil says the real money needs to go to everyday people and not only the well-connected few. All People Have Value is part of NeilAquino.com.

=======================

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Socratic Gadfly caught wind of some post-runoff election rumors.

Nonsequiteuse related a sadly-too-common tale of street harassment.

Grits for Breakfast worried about the high number of child abuse rulings that are subsequently overturned on appeal.

Todo Texas wondered who the next batch of rising Latino political stars in Texas will be once the Castro brothers go national.

Texas Vox noted the correlation between smart subsidies for solar energy and job growth.

The Lunch Tray penned a letter to Michelle Obama.

Texas Watch had five things you need to do to get ready for hurricane season.

PTA Mom asserted that everything she needed to know about politics she learned from school board elections.

Juanita Jean told the best story ever about Pat Robertson and Saran wrap.

And finally, BeyondBones commemorates the Normandy invasion on its 70th anniversary.