LIKE CALIFORNIA, TEXAS HAS ITS SHARE OF KOOKS

For quite some time I have been poking fun at Kookfornia and San Fransicko for the kooks that keep popping up in the former Golden State, now the Rusty Iron State. But my home state of Texas has its own share of kooks.

First we have Tea Party favorite Senator Ted Cruz who is so addicted to obliterating Obamacare that he was willing to have the United States default on its national debt.

Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst wants to impeach President Obama “Not only for trampling on our liberties, but what he did in Benghazi is just a crime.” Dewhurst must have been smoking some funny tobacco when he came up with that one. If he’s talking about the NSA spying on American citizens, that started way before Obama took office. And as for Benghazi, it was the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA that were directly responsible for that tragedy, not Obama.

Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson wants to kick the four states of California, New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut out of the union. That’s not a bad idea, but it’s still kooky because the U.S. Constitution prohibits such an expulsion.

And Texas Railroad Commissioner Barry Smitherman, head of the agency that regulates the state’s energy industry, insists that Texas will survive as a “stand-alone entity” if “the rest of the country falls apart.” While Texas will fare better than most states, it cannot survive on its own if the rest of the country goes down in flames.

Cruz is the darling of the Tea Party because he plays to their slash-and-burn solutions to what they see as being wrong with the country. Dewhurst, Patterson and Smitherman are favorites of the Tea Party as well.

The Tea Party, not just in Texas but everywhere else, has a large number of members, many of them seniors, who are out of their ever-loving minds by insisting on a slash-and-burn strategy to reduce the size of government and government spending. While their goals are admirable, that strategy is a prescription for disaster.

While I agree with The Tea Party’s objective of cutting down the size of government and bringing spending in line with what the government takes in, its members see everything in either black or white, with no shades of grey. Demanding that members of Congress carry out a slash-and-burn attack to achieve their goals is kooky because it’s like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.