Steve Benen reports on critical security updates to the platform of the ineffable Texas Republican Party. “They now want to build “a physical barrier” along the entire Mexican border.” The old, 2004, platform already included modest plans to abolish the Federal income tax, the IRS, and Social Security, with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms thrown in, and affirmed “that the United States of America is a Christian nation”.
What caught my British eye was the support for “the immediate adoption of American English [this? or this?] as the official language of Texas and of the United States of America.” (My emphasis.)
So will it become unlawful to call them wankers?
Author: James Wimberley
James Wimberley (b. 1946, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands. three adult children) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. His main achievements there were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He retired in 2006 to a little white house in Andalucia, His first wife Patricia Morris died in 2009 after a long illness. He remarried in 2011. to the former Brazilian TV actress Lu Mendonça. The cat overlords are now three.
I suppose I've been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I'm quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I'm open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia.
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I'm sure the following planks remain; in fact, a lot are holdovers from the 2002 platform:
— Our Party pledges to do everything within its power to restore the original intent of the First Amendment of the Unites States and dispel the myth of the separation of Church and State.
— We unequivocally oppose United States Senate ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which would transfer jurisdiction over parental rights and responsibilities to international bureaucracies.
— The Party believes the minimum wage law should be repealed.
— The Party calls for the United States monetary system to be returned to the gold standard.
We may not provide any social services for poor children, but at least we're still crazy in the Lone Star State.
"American English" would be a great improvement in Texas, or indeed, in the Oval Office.
Molly Ivins once characterized Texas as our national laboratory for bad public policy. When I lived in California, I thought Texas was a quaint state where Granny BC was born. When I left California for the midwest, I learned that Texas wasn't a quaint place where people wanted to live in an antebellum world, they apparently wanted to live in an antedeluvian world…
Now I live and work in a state bordering Texas, and I think the only right-thinking thing to do is give the damn thing back to Mexico … with the possible exception of a gerrymandered Austin.
BC
Save inside-the-loop Houston as well, and you've got a deal, BC (said the resident of the People's Republic of Austin)
While it is totally correct to refer to Texas Goppers as "wankers," (or "tossers," if that is your preference) please do not call them "Yanks," as this amounts to a slur on the rest of America.
"Tosser" is an Australian insult. So as a "whingeing Pommie tosser" myself, there is no way I would apply it to Yanks or Texans.
Please don't forget that plenty of people in Texas are just as outraged as you about the dangerous rhetoric being spouted by the Texas GOP. Don't paint us all with the same red brush. I know a lot of people with more than one neuron.
Thanks, norbizness, for saving those of us in the inner loop from being sent "back to Mexico", but that's a pretty freakin' elitist comment. Living in the inner loop, as I do, just means that one values proximitty to work over square footage, and you have the financial resources to make that choice; it doesn't necessarily mean one is a progressive. Andrew Fastow lived in the inner loop, and I have a lesbian progressive activist friend who lives in Pearland.
The Texas GOP platform is apalling and shameful. But so is calling us "the lone neuron state" and sending us "back to Mexico". That kind of judgemental bull crap ranks high on the list of things that make us folks in the fly-over zone skeptical of the "costal liberal elites".
The 2nd choice for "American English" certainly comes closer to how real Texans speak 'specially the kind that support W thru thick 'n thin.
Our much more literate founding fathers would be appalled by the standard of "English" written & spoken by Texans, particularly of the right-wing variety.
In my experience W isn't an anomoly. Many of the Texas businessmen I've dealt with (wingers to a man) were inarticulate & frequently incoherent (Not that they couldn't talk the hind leggs off of a dog, just that none of it made any sense). They certainly could run the numbers for their business, but outside of that… One only wonders what they teach in schools in Texas.