Jim Schutze at The Dallas Observer has a good piece up today about politicians using issues like immigration, abortion and gay rights to distract voters from real problems, such as Texas’ current budget shortfall and — more generally — how badly rich people in the U.S. are screwing everyone else over. Here’s an excerpt:
So it’s like this: We ask, “Mr. Governor, what are you going to about the huge deficit that’s going to screw up our kids’ schools and toss our grandparents out in the street and mess up the whole state?”
And he says, “LOOK OVER THERE! A MEXICAN!”
It’s not just Perry. It’s all of the Republicans now. Ask state Sen. Florence Shapiro what she’s going to do to protect colleges and universities from the shortfall. She’ll start talking about how we need “voter ID”
“LOOK! LOOK! A MEXICAN TRYING TO VOTE!”
And if that doesn’t work, the Republicans will point toward San Francisco and say, “LOOK! LOOK! TWO GUYS KISSING!”
Or, “LOOK! LOOK! A SLUT GETTING AN ABORTION.”
In reading Schutze’s piece, we couldn’t help being reminded of this George Carlin bit, so we figured we’d go ahead and share it too:
This is great! Where is the article about how much Tom DeLay has hurt Texas and why his sentence is so unfair for such a huge crime and the injustice to Texan’s. This is going to cost us for years. The man and his peers are crooks.