TEXAS - February 21, 2008

I can hardly contain my dismay at hearing that Hillary now reposes her presidential hopes in the people of TX. It is a fitting sequel to her adoption late last year by Rupert Murdoch, the Hearst of the 21^st Century. It is not quite like seeking campaign funding from Ossama Bin Liden, but it is hard to see how one can do such a thing without coming away with the taint appropriate to the chosen supporter. It is about 175 years since TX entered our national history as a consequence of an unjust war and an especially brutal eradication of the rights and claims of the indigenous people and the previous settlers. Since that time, and especially since the Civil War, TX has stood for the utmost in brutality, injustice, greed and predation. Just to look at W is to see that State’s vices spelled out in caricature: ignorance, laziness, stupidity and general inhumanity. No other State seems so in love with killing, whether settling arguments with sixguns or executing everyone who is so unfortunate as to require justice, or even due process, at the hands of its police and its courts. It represents the worst of what civilized people everywhere turn away from when looking a the U S these days. Of course, there are also fine people in TX. The names of Jim Hightower, Molly Ivins, and Bill Malone spring to mind, and there are no doubt hundreds of others among the millions who live there, but somehow the vicious animals in human form seem to shape the State to their brutal image. And to top it all off, it is the home of the most predatory force in the U S, the oil industry, which holds us all in thrall. It doesn’t actually mean that Hillary must be like them, but as they are famous for noting, “if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.” What will she tell them to win their votes? How she worked for race equality and compassion for the poor and the weak? Not in TX, I believe. That is not the world that many Texans believe in. And what about OH, the home of the Diebold election-stealing machine and the heirs of the Taft tradition? What will she offer them that will win their indifferent little hearts? Not the imprimatur of Dennis Kucinich, I would think.