Ah, Texas.
I never used to care much what happened in the Lone Star State. To me, Texas was too arrogant by half, the state where they killed John F. Kennedy and the home of the hated Dallas Cowboys.
Then I spent 11 weeks in the Hill Country in the summer of 2010.
Beautiful scenery, great people. I hiked hundreds of miles and lost a lot of weight. I drove to Houston and Dallas to see baseball games and I came to see that Texas was a much nicer place than I had thought.
Now Texas is suffering from horrible winter storms that appear to have overwhelmed its energy grid, and in the middle of it all is an argument about who is responsible. A few years back, Texas withdrew from the national energy grid to control its own grid.
At least in this instance, not a good move.
Almost as bad a move as Senator Ted Cruz taking his family to Cancun to escape the situation in Texas. Cruz might have shot himself in both feet politically by doing that and then lying about why he did it.
And he wasn’t even the worst Republican voice in all this. The state’s governor, Greg Abbott, blamed the outages on the Green New Deal, which at this point is just an idea and not reality. The governor before him, Rick Perry, said it was worth the suffering to keep the federal government from regulating Texas’s grid.
Who are these guys?
Do you get the feeling that Texas doesn’t really want to be part of the United States, that Texans would rather be autonomous? I might agree with you, except that Abbott has put in a request to the federal government that may as well have consisted of one word.
“HELLLLLLP!”
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all of us could ignore the government and not worry about its strictures, but folks in Washington would jump when we asked for help?
I do sympathize with the people of Texas, although I think many of them dug their own grave by giving Republicans so much control over their lives.
As for Cruz, if he wants to run for re-election in 2024, as he probably will, my guess is voters won’t punish him for this. It isn’t just a Texas thing, either. American voters in general have the attention span of mayflies.
As for Texas, it will survive despite Cruz, Abbott and Perry. Some great men and women have come out of Texas. Teddy, Greg and Rick aren’t going to be part of that pantheon, but a state that gave us Lyndon Johnson, Molly Ivins and Ann Richards can’t be all bad.
As the late, great Dan Jenkins once wrote, “It’s Baja Oklahoma, but it’s Texas in your soul.”