SocraticGadfly: Texas politics gets an early wild and crazy week

January 25, 2014

Texas politics gets an early wild and crazy week

It was a wild and crazy one.

Let's start with the Democratic race for the U.S. Senate.

After gubernatorial hopeful Wendy Davis, puzzlingly, endorsed David Alameel, many of us wondered if he was a pro-life candidate, which only increased the puzzlement. He eventually said he was pro-choice. However, if so, he's apparently neglected to tell a bunch of powerful Dallas Catholics; so far, his campaign has yet to address this issue.

So far, mainstream media pundits in Texas' biggest metro areas also have yet to address this issue, even though Dem flacks like Matt Angle insist that old Republican donations by Alameel mean nothing. Matty Boy has yet to explicitly address the pro-life issues, though.

Davis apparently had other puzzlement, helped little by those media pundits pouncing on a few inconsistencies in her campaign bio.

That didn't bother me a lot, though it was interesting.

However, it led me to see something much more interesting. And that is how Davis, who talks about being raised by a single mother, seems to have pretty much written out her mother from the adult years of her campaign life.

Meanwhile, pundits, the Davis and Greg Abbott campaigns, and others, continued to dispute whether she had beat Abbott or not on the first quarter-pole campaign finance marker.

Abbott showed just how thin his skin is; upset by "Wheelchair Ken" responses to "Abortion Barbie" mudslinging by his surrogates, he eventually begged for the help of Andrew Breitbart scion James O'Keefe.

But, not all the fun was in the governor's race.

Four Republican candidates for lieutenant governor were throwing ever-sharper elbows in an ever-smaller patch of GOP Lite Guv campaign space. All of them, as blogger P.Diddle says, in various ways want to fight the poor Ill Eagles. That's why I speculate Jerry Patterson appealed for Tejano votes, not Latino or Hispanic ones.

Each of the four his his own quirky personality. But, if this race comes down to money, Patterson may be out in the cold.

If all this weren't enough, Louie Gohmert hit a new stupidity low. If we're lucky, this one will remove him from the state of Texas politics a decade or so early.

And, Rick Perry, possibly tired of visits to California and Illinois, decided to take his carny barker road show international — to Davos, specifically.

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