I do not care for this Ted Cruz character

If you combine a lack of a sense of humor with an absence of humility and then stir in a cup of self-righteousness,

Well, Texas doesn’t much care for this Collins character with her lack of a sense of humour, her complete absence of humility, and her bigger-than-Texas self-righteousness.

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.”

…

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 rest of the country can’t do all that much to dictate where Texas goes what with states’ rights, states’ rights, states’ rights.”

– Gail Collins

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?

What’s The Matter With Texas? Absolutely Nothing.

M2RB: ZZ Top, live from Paris, 2010

Resist We Much on March 16, 2013 at 3:56 PM