I Just Finished

reading Michael Lind's Made in Texas, and I highly recommend the book. I especially like how Lind points out there are actually two Texases, one of the more progressive Texas of LBJ, and the other one of George W. Bush, the latter being rooted not in progressivism but in the old plantation South in its attitude towards race, labor, religion, and government.

It's a short, very readable book, but Lind gets to the heart of the matter. "Southernomics" is a threat to the national economy and the South's strong militarist tradition is a threat to the world. And that's not even mentioning the unholy alliance of fundamentalists with the neocons or the plantation mentality which is wrecking the entire country and not just Texas.

In a footnote, Lind points out the fact that little pious twit Tom DeLay "who had been expelled as an undergraduate from Baylor Baptist University for misbehavior, claimed that Baylor and another Texas university known for its conservatism, Texas A&M, were corrupted by liberalism. 'Don't send your kids to Baylor. And don't send your kids to A&M.' One has to be pretty far to the right to consider Baylor and Texas A&M to be centers of godless secular humanism."

But lying or hypocrisy is the order of the day for these creeps. Lind's book gives the reader a thorough understanding of the inexplicable "philosophy" of "conservatism" as the mutant version what used to be called conservatism is now called.