The only things they can't stand are people who don't think like them, don't act like them and don't vote like them.
Posted on 07/27/2012 9:13:24 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Liberals talk about Texas the way conservatives talk about France, only with more passion and profanity. During an appearance on Don Imus’s radio show in 2007, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews said, “I’m so sick of southern guys with ranches running this country. I want a guy to run for president who doesn’t have a f***ing ranch.” Asked why he was swearing on the air, Matthews said, “I don’t know. I got excited.” F-ing excited.
This is what Texas does to liberals.
In her new book, As Texas Goes . . . : How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda, Gail Collins, an Ohioan by birth and a New York Times columnist, says that Texas is running the country and also ruining it. In her view, Texas is “frequently somewhat lunatic,” as evidenced, for example, by “its completely crazy abstinence-only sex education in high school,” “its lunatic war on family planning,” and its board of education’s “overall craziness.”
To be sure, Texas politicians can be unhinged at times. In 2003, Representative Debbie Riddle of Houston asked, “Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell.” Such talk is not only uncivil and theologically unsound but also factually inaccurate. The idea of free education, after all, came from Leningrad, not Moscow.
Texas’s craziness wouldn’t be so ominous but for the fact that, according to Collins, “Texas runs everything.” Whether or not it does, it is clear that liberals want to run everything in Texas. For example: “We,” Collins told Rachel Maddow, “should get to have a little bit of a say about whether or not there is any family planning [in Texas].”
Among the problems Collins finds in the state are “a tax system that favors the wealthy”; lax environmental regulations; a “stupendous lack of enthusiasm for ongoing social services”; the state’s gun laws; its voter-identification laws (“your gun license counts as a voter ID but not your university ID card”); weak labor unions; low voter turnout, specifically among minorities and other traditional Democratic constituencies; “education privatization”; its school textbooks; its style of sex education, which teaches that having sex carries the risk of “transmission of the Ebola virus”; its population growth (surprisingly high for a state where Ebola is an STD); “the almost complete lack of state family planning funds”; “a two-tiered economy in which the failing underclass looks resentfully at the happy sliver on the top”; and “its obsession with states’ rights.” Texas’s problems, you see, are mostly conservative problems. And the cure is liberalism, or what Collins calls “the American agenda.”
The debate, of course, really isn’t about Texas’s problems so much as it is about the Left’s problems with Texas. As far back as 1964, The Nation found “something rotten in the state of Texas.” Twenty years later, Nicholas Lemann deemed Texans to be “sorely lacking in compassion” (i.e., sorely lacking in government social programs). Michael Lind faulted Texas for having “a primitive extractive economy,” “inadequate spending on public goods like education and pollution abatement,” and “a cruel caste society” in which minorities toil for the benefit of “a cultivated but callous oligarchy of rich white families.” A liberal columnist for the St. Petersburg Times said that even friendly Texans “have conservatism’s instinctive meanness.” The late Molly Ivins referred to Texas as “the National Laboratory for Bad Government” (a title more suitable for the District of Columbia).
This last point is an important one. One of the advantages of federalism is that it allows each state to serve as a laboratory of democracy. “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system,” Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote in 1932, “that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory, and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”
Inevitably, the results aren’t always gratifying. But just because you don’t like the way one state conducts its affairs, that is no reason to subvert the experimental process.
What liberals don’t like about Texas is their inability to transform it. “The rest of the country can’t do all that much to dictate where Texas goes,” Collins laments, “what with states’ rights, states’ rights, states’ rights.” She wants Americans to “work together for our great national goals [i.e., liberal goals] rather than obsessing so much about how we want to be left alone.” Is it any wonder that Texans want to be left alone when New York Times columnists seek to convert their state into a big Massachusetts?
If Texas is inflicting damage on the country, federalism can mitigate the damage. It cannot solve the problems in Texas, but it can contain most of them. Sometimes the best way to settle disagreements is to avoid them. As a general rule, it’s better to localize the problems than to nationalize the solutions. Let Texans mess with Texas.
— Windsor Mann is the editor of The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism.
Who’s kidding who?
Texas is crawling with illegal aliens.
I have to admit that inspiring such fear and loathing in effete eastern snobs is one of the attractions of Texas.
Comparing the success of Texas to the incompetence of California sure disturbs many leftists, as this article points out.
As a native Texan, Gail Collins can go to H#ll - or go back to NY (same thing)
The rest of the country should be damn glad Texans still hold the pioneer spirit and will fight for liberty instead of rolling over like a wimp.
Take Texas out of the US economy — US falls in a New York minute.
“.....Texas is “frequently somewhat lunatic,”.....
Yeah, that’s us. Still crazy after all these years. We like it that way. If’n you don’t, well there are 56 other states you can choose from.
I had to chuckle - as I read her list of the eeeeevils of Texas, I was saying to myself, “Yup. Yup. Ahhh, yup. So what’s the problem?”
Ain’t nothin’ like a drive in the Hill Country or the taste of a peach on the courthouse square in Hondo.
She should go hang out in Austin. She would feel right at home.
Actually, Texas is turning pink as more and more Liberals move there.
TEXAS! It’s more than a state. It’s a state of mind!
Texas has been my home all my life..I went away for a few years but not to settle in another state or country..I lived in both but I can tell you when it was time to come home i was ready..It wasn’t because i hated the other places I lived I rather enjoyed them..New culture the people were so kind but I have never ever felt at home like I do here..You see we don’t nottolerate liars and criminals..Oh we have thoes here too but they are all democrats or criminals that vote democrat..We are a God loving state..and intend to keep it that way..
If you don’t ike us you don’t have to visit here or live here..As a matter a fact we would even help you pack and send you on your way..Stay in your sewer infested holes and don’t try to change us..Thanks and remember “Don’t Mess With Texas”
As someone native to the dark and fascist Peoples Republik of Neu Jersey, who got to Texas as soon as he could (11 1/2 years ago), all I can say to those that don’t like how Texas governs itself is, “phuk y’all!”
I am glad that I finally have representation, unlike in Jersey.
I’m glad that I don’t run the risk of being in jail for at least 200 years simply for owning some metal boxes that house springs that some idiots in state government have deemed to be “too big” (firearms magazines of greater than 15 rounds, for those of you unfamiliar with the NJ ban).
I’m glad that as long as I’m a law-abiding ciitzen who’s taken a qualification test that I can carry a firearm for self-protection and protection of my family (and, yes, even into movie houses - they DARE not post such signs here, or they’ll be out of business).
I’m glad that there’s no state income tax.
I’m glad that we have 70, 75 and 80 MPH speed limits - that the cops don’t enforce, since they have the common sense to only bother people that are a danger to others.
I’m glad that we can frack for oil, because its providing tens of thousands of jobs, and billions in tax revenue to the state.
I’m glad that my state has a law against eminent domain takings for private purposes which are masquerading as being “in the public interest.”
I’m glad that most people here are church-going (even though I’m Jewish), because it means that we are by and large a more moral and decent place, and that people here are FAR more friendly than in the lieberal cesspools of the northeast, Shitcago and the Left(ist) coast.
I’m glad that most people here are conservative, because it means that we are by and large a more moral and decent place (this and the previous item are closely correlated).
I’m glad that we drive the lieberals crazy - it means that we must be doing a whole lot of things just the right way.
Once again, phuk y’all.
If you don't like us you don't have to visit here or live here..As a matter a fact we would even help you pack and send you on your way..Stay in your sewer infested holes and don't try to change us..Thanks and remember “Don't Mess With Texas”
100% correct. Demographics will do the libs’ work for them within a generation or two. I don’t understand why people refuse to see that Texas is in the process of being californicated.
The only things they can't stand are people who don't think like them, don't act like them and don't vote like them.
There is no question that immigration is killing America, but Texas and California are both big border states with a history of immigration and illegals.
California is a failure because it’s people were never truly conservative, they were always mushy moderates and not very religious, Texans are deeply conservative, and very much deep, even Evangelical Christian.
Texans are much more capable and willing to solve problems than Californians are, (or were).
Texas is crawling with illegal aliens.
Indeed demographics are transforming TX.
“To be sure, Texas politicians can be unhinged at times. In 2003, Representative Debbie Riddle of Houston asked, “Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell.” Such talk is not only uncivil and theologically unsound but also factually inaccurate. The idea of free education, after all, came from Leningrad, not Moscow.”
I love that line, this is what makes me laugh at New Yorkers when they make statements like this.
Yes This repressive idea that everything must be provided at Tax-payer experience came from Russia.
You are very correct...Dallas is now more liberal than Austin
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