Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller’s obscene tweet about Hillary Rodham Clinton is the “breaking point” for at least one Texas voter.
Is it for others who have been entrenched in the Donald J. Trump camp since the zillionaire business mogul announced his Republican presidential candidacy?
Do not take it to the bank.
A tweet that went out under Miller’s name referred to Clinton as the “c-word.” It’s too vulgar to repeat. As Jacquielyne Floyd of the Dallas Morning News writes in her blog, Miller came up with a package of lame excuses: a staffer did it; someone hacked his account.
Miller said he didn’t do such a thing. The tweet was pulled down right away, which I guess is saying something about the commissioner.
Then again, this guy has been making a spectacle of himself ever since he took over the TDA office from fellow Republican Todd Staples in 2015. I wish Staples was still on the job, frankly.
Miller has emerged as Trump’s chief Texas cheerleader.
Floyd writes: “My weary, overworked outrage meter is idling in low gear, like persistent background static on the radio. I can only summon a tired wonder that Miller, whose newest contretemps is perhaps the most egregious but far from being the first rodeo of disgrace and embarrassment he has attended, is the kind of damage Texas keeps inflicting on itself.”
Texas, though, seems bent on inflicting these wounds. We have sent a number of folks to Congress who keep spouting off without engaging what passes for their brains.
Now we have an agriculture commissioner — who ought to be focused primarily on promoting Texas farm and ranch products and helping them improve their harvest yields and getting the most money they can from the livestock they send to market.
The voter — Kathleen Lyle of Rowlett — who was offended beyond measure by the tweet, wrote a letter to Miller. According to Floyd: “Lyle demanded an apology for every woman and every schoolchild in the state of Texas: “‘You are obligated to behave decently in public once elected,’ she told him.”
Floyd continued: “It was a letter that summed up not only one woman’s frustration over one elected official’s outrageous violation, but spoke for countless Americans who are appalled by the ugliness, the unhinged vulgarity, the puerile bullying shoutdown to which the political conversation has devolved.”
The tweet that went out under Sid Miller’s name is just the latest example of all the above.
If only more of us would feel as outraged as Kathleen Lyle.
