Rick Wilson once was a Republican Party activist and strategist. These days he shows up on TV to criticize what has become of the party of which he once was a proud member.
He showed up this past week to put down a notion espoused by right-wing nut job Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Loony Bin, who proclaimed her intention to turn the United States into a Christian nation.
He offered this brief explainer that I’ll just let stand on its own.
“First off, I need them to stop talking about the founders at this point,” he began. “If you stretch back to the Mayflower, this is a country that was founded on fleeing from the religious persecution of an official state religion. And when the constitution was being framed, we had states and we had leaders who all understood that this country was going to have a pluralistic approach to religion, which was to say, the government would neither condone nor suppress any religion.”
I have to say this as loudly and clearly as I possibly can say anything: The American electoral process is clean, fair and its integrity does not need to be “restored.”
Once again — ad nauseum — we hear adherents of the former Big Liar in Chief suggest that there is something fundamentally broken within the electoral system.
There isn’t. The system ain’t broke. The excuse mounted that declares “widespread vote fraud” is the result of one man losing the 2020 presidential election by 7 million ballots. He has succeeded in planting sufficient doubt in the gullible skulls of his cult followers about the integrity of the most recent presidential balloting.
Court after court, expert after expert all have determined that the loser’s assertion of widespread voter fraud is, in itself, fraudulent. The only theft of the election results has been the work of the loser’s attempt to toss out legitimate election returns.
Having taken a swing or two at the critics of the electoral system, I want to assert that the system isn’t perfect. Then again, it’s never been absolutely free of the occasional effort by someone, somewhere to cast an illegal ballot. Hey, it goes with the territory.
There have been reported isolated incidents of phony votes cast since, oh let’s see, the beginning of the Republic!
But to hear Republican politicians these days, you’d think the entire system is corrupt. That it’s crooked. That the integrity of the system is so compromised that it puts our national government in dire peril.
Only one problem has existed with this hysteria: No one has proven a word of it!
The midterm election is coming on quickly. There will be some election deniers on the ballot in several states. They will continue to promote The Big Lie as they try to persuade voters to send them to public office. The midterm election will be as clean and relatively corruption-free as the 2020 election turned out to be.
I just have heard all I can stand to hear from those who proclaim to seek a “restoration” of our electoral integrity. There is not a damn thing to restore.
“I’m going to make sure Donald Trump, make sure he’s not the nominee … And if he is the nominee, I won’t be a Republican.”
Let’s ponder for a moment who made that statement.
It comes from Liz Cheney, the senior Republican on the House select 1/6 committee. She has been a Republican her entire adult life. Her dad is former Vice President Richard B. Cheney, a Republican’s Republican if ever there was one.
She has declared at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin that if Donald J. Trump is the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, she will cease belonging to the party to which she has devoted her entire public life.
In one way that stuns me, given what I know about Cheney’s GOP credentials. In another way, I shouldn’t be surprised.
Wyoming voters cast her aside in August’s GOP primary. She sought another term as Wyoming’s lone member of the U.S. House. GOP primary voters said, in effect, forget about it, Liz; we don’t want you in the party. We censured you because you aren’t loyal to Trump.
According to the Texas Tribune: Cheney maintained that she is an ardent conservative on policy issues, voting in near lockstep with Trump’s legislative agenda when he was in office. But she warned a House Republican majority would give outsized power to members who have been staunch allies of the former president and his efforts to keep the White House, including U.S. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Jim Jordan.
And she is all of that. Cheney also believes in the rule of law, in the oath she and Trump both took to “defend and protect” the Constitution.
Frankly — despite the fact that she represents an ideology that I dislike and my belief that Trump won’t be nominated in 2024 — I happen to be proud of Rep. Liz Cheney for standing firm on behalf of the truth.
Well now, it appears we have a fascinating discussion brewing about the way the media treat athletes caught doing illegal acts or making public demonstrations about serious policy matters.
If you’re Black, the media are going to climb all over you. If you’re white … not so much.
Consider the cases of two Black football players, Michael Vick and Colin Kaepernick. Vick was convicted of sending pit bulls to their death in dog fights. Kaepernick was vilified because he chose to take a knee during the National Anthem to protest police conduct against Black citizens. Vick and Kaepernick are Black.
You with me so far?
Now we have Brett Favre, another former pro football quarterback, who’s accused of stealing money intended to help poor Black residents of Alabama and Mississippi. Where’s the outcry? Where is the condemnation?
I want to make another point. None of us wants to see dogs tortured, but … they aren’t human beings. No physical harm was done to anyone when Kaepernick launched his star-spangled protest.
In the case of Favre, people are suffering because someone — allegedly it’s Favre — stole money from accounts set aside to help those individuals.
Mahsa Amini’s identity, I believe, well might become a household name soon in a place where one wouldn’t expect.
That would be the Islamic Republic of Iran. Amini was a 26-year-old Iranian woman who was taken into custody and who later died. Why? Because she showed a few too many strands of her hair outside the hijab she was wearing.
Women must follow certain conservative tenets of Islamic faith, such as ensuring their hair is tucked away. The penalty is the fate that befell Mahsa Amini.
Amini’s death has prompted protests the likes of which have rarely been seen or heard since the Ayatollah Khomeini’s forces seized control of Iran in 1979.
Iranians have marched onto city streets seeking justice for Mahsi Amini, who by any measure of human decency should be alive today. Indeed, she should be walking free in her country. But, oh no. She’s now dead because that hideously named “morality police” squad took her into custody and quite likely killed her.
As Time Magazine reported on its website, Mahsa Amini has become a martyr to a cause unknown in the power circles of the governing Islamic Republic: human rights.
On social media, her name became an Iranian version of #MeToo — a prompt for ordinary people to post experiences of loss and oppression at the hands of the Islamic Republic, gathered under #MahsaAmini.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been on the U.S. sh** list of nations that flout basic human rights for its citizens.
Too often people become victimized in nations such as Iran. The world wrings its hands and calls go out for justice. Then the emotion subsides, and the world’s attention turns to other crises.
Let us not allow Mahsa Amini’s name to recede into the background. She needs to remain at the top of our consciousness and must become a cudgel for the civilized world to use against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
A political action committee has launched an intriguing midterm election campaign in Texas that appears plainly aimed at turning women out to vote in this year’s campaign.
They call themselves “Coulda Been Worse, LLC.” The PAC has paid for a series of TV ads that tell voters that “three men” are responsible for virtually banning abortion in Texas, despite polling that shows a significant majority of Texans favor allowing women the right to choose.
Coulda Been Worse singles out Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. “Three men,” the ad repeats, have decided that Texas women must not be allowed to determine whether to end a pregnancy.
The ad concludes with Abbott uttering “it coulda been worse” while he was briefing the public about the Uvalde school massacre, which killed 19 fourth graders and two heroic teachers in Robb Elementary School.
Coulda Been Worse LLC also has broadcast an ad telling voters how Abbott made a choice in the wake of the Uvalde slaughter to attend a fundraiser rather than visit Uvalde to perform his duties as “the father of Texas.”
I am not going to predict that the campaign against Abbott, Patrick and Paxton will prove decisive. But, man, the PAC has plenty of material with which it is working. It has the backdrop of that Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, a ruling that has outraged millions of women everywhere … including Texas!
Paxton is seeking a third term — despite being under felony indictment for the past seven years — against an ACLU lawyer, Rochelle Garza; polls show the contest a virtual dead heat. Patrick is facing Mike Collier in a lieutenant governor rematch from 2018.
Of course, Abbott is facing former Congressman Beto O’Rourke, currently the darling of the Texas Democratic Party; polls in that race are all over the place, with some of them showing a tightening contest while others suggest Abbott is pulling away.
If there is a hot button to push, my hope is that Coulda Been Worse can find it and push it incessantly until it produces what I deem to be the desired outcome: the defeat of Abbott, Patrick and Paxton.
I am going to vent briefly about something that has annoyed me ever since I decided in the old days to study journalism in college.
It is the tendency of some reporters to become part of the story they are covering. Sigh …
I like to think of reporters the way I think of referees at sporting events. We shouldn’t talk about the officiating that’s taking place, but instead about what the athletes are doing.
But here we are. We get caught up in the reporters’ aggressive questioning of public officials. It’s made worse when the public official bristles at the reporter and then pulls the reporter straight into the issue being discussed.
Examples? Hmm. Sam Donaldson of ABC News frequently tussled with President Reagan at news conferences. Before that, we had Dan Rather of CBS News jousting with President Nixon. Then came Britt Hume of ABC News hassling President Clinton.
Some more? CNN’s Jim Acosta became a spoil sport at Donald Trump’s press events and now we have Fox News’ Peter Doocy rising to the challenge during White House press briefings conducted by Karine Jean-Pierre, press flack for the Biden administration.
I care next to nothing about which reporter is getting under a president’s skin. Nor do I give a damn about wondering whether they’re doing their job.
We ought to know when a reporter is doing his or her job simply by gauging the depth of the question and whether the subject is answering it fully.
A reporter shouldn’t ever become part of the story. Just let the story tell itself.
Gerald Ford spoke a fundamental truth only minutes after taking office as president of the United States in August 1974.
“Our Constitution works,” President Ford reminded us, as if we needed reminding about the crisis that preceded his becoming president. His predecessor, Richard Nixon, resigned just as he was about to be impeached and tried (and likely convicted) for high crimes against the Constitution.
I want to remind everyone who worries about whether the Constitution will hold up under the pressure being applied to it these days by a former POTUS who all but vows violence if he is indicted for criminal activity.
I am going to remain somewhat calm about the strength of the Constitution. It did survive the Watergate scandal. President Nixon had to quit. President Ford took office as the Constitution had been battered and bruised by the calamity of Nixon’s abuse of power.
It survived then. I am going to continue to believe in the strength of the Constitution now as the nation awaits the outcome of several investigations into a former president’s effort to upend the “peaceful transfer of power” from one administration to the next one.
I will concede that the transfer of power was not peaceful. It was bloodied by the 1/6 insurrection. However, the transition did occur.
Readers of High Plains Blogger might recall a statement made on it that I am writing a memoir for members of my family.
The memoir is about two-thirds finished. It contains personal reminiscences of people I met during my career as a print journalist and recalls the more fascinating sights I saw and experiences that came my way.
I want to reveal one of the people I cite in this memoir. I won’t spill all the beans, but I do want to share one element of this individual’s character that I found most appealing.
***
The late Teel Bivins served as a Republican state senator from the Texas Panhandle from 1989 until 2004. I arrived at the Amarillo Globe-News in January 1995 to stand post as editorial page editor of the daily newspapers we published in Amarillo.
I knew a little bit about Bivins when I arrived, given that I had spent nearly 11 years at the Beaumont Enterprise. I had been watching the Legislature during my decade on the Gulf Coast.
My phone rang a few days after I arrived in Amarillo. It was Bivins’ office in downtown Amarillo. He wanted to meet with me. Good deal, I said. I’ll be right over.
I walked into Bivins’ office. Then he welcomed me to his desk. We shook hands, I sat down, exchanged a bit of small talk about this and that politician we both knew. He asked me about my family. I told him of my marital bliss and the pride we share in our sons who at the time were just completing their college studies.
Then it came.
Bivins at that point proceeded to tell me a tale of woe and a bit of horror at the condition of his wife. She suffered from alcohol and drug abuse, he said. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know whether he could stay married to her. Bivins said he was at the end of his tolerance with her. “I don’t think I can keep this up,” he said.
I mention this because in that moment, a politician I had known for, oh, about 30 minutes took the time to expose a part of his life that obviously caused him great pain.
I shall admit that in that moment, I didn’t realize what became clear to me a few days later. A legislative aide to Bivins informed that the reason Bivins wanted to tell that story about his wife was that he wanted to get ahead of a story I likely would hear … from someone else.
Do you get it? The man wanted to tell me his version of events before I heard someone else’s version.
It truly was an astonishing thing to reveal to a total stranger, let alone to someone — such as me — who was in a position to offer commentary on politicians’ personal lives.
I have retained a vivid memory of that first meeting with a prominent Texas politician. I do so on purpose, as it reminds me that politicians — of all people — indeed, can achieve a form of nobility.
You hear the refrain all the time, that society went to hell when the U.S. Supreme Court took prayer away from teachers and students in our public schools.
To which I say: nonsense!
For starters, I do not believe society has gone to hell. For critics of modern life, though, to assign blame for such an idiotic notion to a single court decision simply fails to look through a wide enough lens.
The SCOTUS ruled in the early 1960s that reciting prayers in public schools violated the First Amendment clause that prohibits the establishment of a “state religion.” Let’s be candid and clear about something: The prayers we all talk about are Christian prayers, which always end with a phrase that references “Jesus’s name.”
As I’ve tried to note, the Constitution doesn’t allow for Christian prayers, or Jewish prayers, or Muslim prayers in public schools. If we accept that public schools are products of local government — and I most certainly do — then public school systems are not exempt from the constitutional prohibitions laid out.
I also understand the “religious freedom” and “religious liberty” arguments that come from those who want to restore prayer in public schools. I happen to view those terms in broad terms. “Religious freedom and liberty” can be interpreted to mean that one is “free from religion” and is “liberated” from it, too.
Invariably I fall back on the notion to which I have subscribed my entire adult life. I am all for religion. I am a practicing Christian. I just want to save my prayer time for my own private moments … and for Sunday, when I’m sitting in church.
