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<div class="timestamp">August 1, 2012</div>
<h1>For God, Texas and Golf</h1>
<h6 class="byline">By
<span>
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/gailcollins/index.html" rel="author" title="More Articles by GAIL COLLINS">GAIL COLLINS</a></span></h6>
<div id="articleBody">
<p>
Texas Republicans have just nominated a Senate candidate who is
promising to protect America’s golf courses from the United Nations.
</p>
<p>
This is not actually the most important point about Ted Cruz, the Tea
Party favorite who scored a dramatic upset victory over the state’s
lieutenant governor on Tuesday. But we don’t really need to go over his
basic agenda because you can pretty much guess it. (Hint: <em>cutspendingshrinkgovernmentrepealObamacare.</em>) Also, he memorized the Constitution in high school. And he wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service. </p>
<p>
But about golf: In a blog posting early this year, Cruz vowed that as
senator he would fight against “a dangerous United Nations plan” on
environmental sustainability that he said was aimed at abolishing “golf
courses, grazing pastures and paved roads.” He blamed all this on the
Democratic financier-philanthropist George Soros. </p>
<p>
While I could personally look with equanimity upon the idea of a world
without golf courses, the thing Cruz was talking about is actually a
vague, nonbinding resolution that’s more than 20 years old. </p>
<p>
The Senate seat in question is currently held by Kay Bailey Hutchison, a
politically conservative and emotionally moderate Republican who liked
working on undramatic issues like aviation safety. Cruz’s victory was
the latest in a number of Tea Party triumphs in Republican primaries,
and it certainly does suggest that next year the Republican Senate
contingent will be composed almost entirely of right-wing purists and
people who are afraid they’re going to be primaried by a right-wing
purist. </p>
<p>
It’s so ironic, people. The national electorate is totally turned off by
partisan standoffs. You can almost hear the public imploring, <em>will you guys please just make some back-room deals?</em> And, at that same moment, the Republican candidates are being pushed into being more and more intractable. </p>
<p>
Cruz will now run this fall against Paul Sadler, the Democratic nominee,
who says that since Tuesday he’s been getting an “unbelievable” number
of calls from people offering support and money. That would be a good
thing because Sadler’s campaign war chest was previously the size of a
piggy bank. </p>
<p>
If Cruz wins the seat, he’d be the third Hispanic member of the Senate —
two of them Republican, all of them Cuban-American. Perhaps it was a
coincidence that just as he was cruising to victory, the Democrats
announced that Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio would be the keynote
speaker at their convention. Castro is the 37-year-old son of a single
mother whose twin brother, Joaquín, is a state legislator currently
running for a safe Democratic seat in Congress. </p>
<p>
<em>Take that, Republicans! We’ll see you one Cuban-American Harvard Law
graduate who memorized the Constitution when he was in high school and
raise you Mexican-American twins who went to Harvard Law and got elected
mayor and state representative! </em>The race for the Hispanic vote
goes on, and we will try to avoid mentioning that virtually the only
thing all three of these people have in common is an inability to speak
fluent Spanish. </p>
<p>
Texas money and Texas politicians helped create the Tea Party movement,
and the state does tend to treasure the extreme. The current Republican
state platform calls for an end to the teaching of “critical thinking”
in public schools. In the Texas primary this week, a member of the State
Supreme Court lost renomination to a former county judge who had made
his name fighting for the right to work in a courtroom with a picture of
the Ten Commandments on the wall and a monument to the Bible in the
front yard. </p>
<p>
There’s always been a strong antigovernment strain in Texas politics,
which seems to have something to do with Texans being obsessed with the
fact that their state was once an independent republic. “We are very
proud of our Texas history,” Gov. Rick Perry once said. “People discuss
and debate the issues of can we break ourselves into five states, can we
secede, a lot of interesting things that I’m sure Oklahoma and
Pennsylvania would love to be able to say about their states, but, the
fact is, they can’t. Because they’re not Texas.” He was totally <em>stunned</em> when it turned out that nobody wanted to nominate him for president. </p>
<p>
But even Perry was supporting Cruz’s opponent, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst,
who represented the traditional Texas Republican business establishment.
(Dewhurst himself has a Mitt Romney-sized fortune.) But he turned out
to be a terrible debater and lethargic campaigner. His platform was
basically the same as Cruz’s, although with a slightly shorter list of
federal agencies to abolish. </p>
<p>
Maybe the real answer to this and all the other Tea
Party-over-establishment upsets is that the traditional Republican party
is just burned out, and devoid of fresh faces. It’s either that or the
golf course peril. </p><br clear="all"></div><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br><br><img src="http://users.moscow.com/waf/WP%20Fox%2001.jpg"><br>
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