Election Day Musings on Things Curmie Didn’t Know.

 

Whatever happens in terms of who gets elected, tomorrow will be glorious because there will be no more political ads and no more pleas for money to support political campaigns.  Curmie suspects that he is not alone in wanting it all to be over.  He might be able to withstand physical torture for a while, but would almost certainly turn over the nuclear codes (if he knew them) when threatened with watching a non-stop stream of dark money funded misrepresentations which, whoever wins, will have the effect of reducing citizens’ confidence in the integrity of government.

Curmie offers a few tidbits of things he didn’t know.  These really go beyond the usual nonsense: someone supported raising the Social Security cap and therefore “wants to raise Social Security taxes,” or they voted against a bill that included 1000 awful things and one good thing and therefore don’t support the good thing, or they suggest that a graduated income tax is less regressive than a sales tax and therefore want to impose an income tax (casually omitting the concomitant reduction in other taxes).  You’ve seen all this before, Gentle Reader.

Curmie also didn’t know that all Muslim candidates (or, indeed, non-candidates) want to impose Sharia Law, or that schools are apparently performing sex change operations during the lunch break, or that grown men are taking over all the slots on high school girls’ basketball teams.  Curmie also expresses his erstwhile ignorance that someone whose parents brought their toddler with them when they entered the country illegally is just as dangerous as a rapist or murderer even if they’ve never had as much as a speeding ticket.

There was one ad this time—Curmie forgets who it was for (or, rather, who it was against, since it was funded by dark money)—opened by promising to tell the truth rather than just opinion: it then proceeded to describe the other candidate as a “dangerous socialist” and cited Fox Business News as a source for that claim.  <Sigh.>

It’s the specificity of some of the assertions that really has Curmie scratching his head.  Curmie lives in Texas, which also happens to be the home of three of the most mendacious figures in American politics… and it takes rather a lot to be considerably worse than the average pol of either party.

Let’s see: apart from accusing Gina Hinojosa of supporting policies she has expressly opposed, Governor Greg Abbott claims she voted 45 times in the state legislature to raise property taxes.  It’s possible that that’s even true.  It’s also possible that an earlier ad claiming that the state government has nothing to do with property taxes and we should oppose local governments who want to raise those rates is accurate.  Curmie struggles to see how both of those alleged statements of fact could both be true, but then, he’s not a slimeball politician who’ll say (or do) anything to remain in power.

Moving on to the Senate race, where Ken Paxton was Dear Leader’s choice in the GOP primary against incumbent John Cornyn because despite the fact that he’s been impeached for bribery by his own party and has offered sweetheart deals to wealthy confessed child sex offenders.  Another of those dark money ads claims that Democratic challenger James Talarico wants to raise taxes by $400 trillion.  Yes, Gentle Reader, that’s about 13 times the national GDP.  That Talarico dude is one hell of a spendthrift with other people’s money, isn’t he?

Either of Abbott’s claims about property taxes might be true; they seem plausible enough except when presented side-by-side.  The anti-Talarico ad seems to have just thrown a big number out there with no real attention paid to whether anyone would raise an eyebrow.  (It’s also possible that the number has been changed recently to, say, $400 billion: still an absurd figure unless we’re talking about a multi-year process.  Curmie punches the mute button on the remote as soon as any political commercial comes around, so he might have missed a correction.)

But then there’s Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who claims credit for raising average teacher salaries by $69,000.  Not “to” that amount, “by” that much.  Curmie has a lot of former students who would be thrilled by the “to” figure.  Patrick’s ad is simply hilarious on its face.  People might not consciously distinguish between big numbers, or note the apparent contradictions in Abbott’s messaging, but they do know that teachers didn’t get raises of anything close to $69K.  Patrick is not just a liar; he’s a bad one.  But given the fact that Curmie hasn’t seen a single ad or yard sign for Democratic candidate Vikki Goodwin, Patrick probably has the best chance of the trio of winning his race.  You may already know by the time you’re reading this, Gentle Reader.

Curmie is not suggesting here that the Democrats aren’t perfectly willing to smear their opponent.  Is Paxton, for example, really the “most corrupt politician in the country”?  Curmie would would have thought that Dear Leader would have wrapped up that title.  And opinions masquerading as facts are pretty much standard operating procedure in political campaigns.  But there ought to be a limit, and the GOP candidates in the three most important state-wide races have shown themselves to be not merely dishonest, but stupid about it.

Anyone who would vote for any of them is likely to be a little dim-witted, too. 

Oh.  Yeah.  QED.