What is it about Texas that is so toxic?
Don't mess with Texas?! What sane person would want to? It's enough of a mess already. It borders on Mexico and seems to emulate its third-world, poltical style. I just wish it wouldn't export its mess to the rest of the country, which is what the rest of us are allowing the thugs who come from there to do. If you're from Texas, I'm sure you're a fine person, but tell me, how can you bear it?
I wrote a piece last October after the Miers nomination about how understanding it can be a big help in understanding how the crony capitalist system being promoted by our president is an extension of Texas society. (I also wrote a piece about this called "The Southernization of American Politics," which, if you're interested, you can find here.) Along these lines, Sidney Blumenthal has an interesting piece in this morning's Salon that shows how Katharine Armstrong's ranch plays a pivotal role in that society--a subject at least as interesting as whether Cheney was drunk or not when he shot Whittington.
The point is that royalty doesn't have to live by the same rules as the rest of us. Understanding the dynamics of a society ruled by royals is what we really have to understand. Blumenthal's article ends with a paragraph, which I think draws an interesting analogy to Jean Renoir's film The Rules of the Game.
The curiosities surrounding the vice president's accident have created a contemporary version of "The Rules of the Game" with a Texas twist. In Jean Renoir's 1939 film, politicians and aristocrats mingle at a country house in France over a long weekend, during which a merciless hunt ends with a tragic shooting. Appearing on the eve of World War II, "The Rules of the Game" depicted a hypocritical, ruthless and decadent ruling class that made its own rules and led a society to the edge of catastrophe.
Understanding the quasi-banana Republic mentality of the Texas political elites can give you a good insight into the kind of place Bush, Cheney, Rove and their gang of plutocrats want to take the country. Read Michael Lind's Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics if you want to read a more sustained argument about how this dynamic in American power distribution is a key to understanding the shift to the right since 1980.
Since Salon is a subscription only, I'll excerpt some of Blumenthal's aricle here to give you some sense of the bloodlines and alliances that determine the "rules of the game."
Both the vice president and the deputy chief of staff [Karl Rove], as it happens, owed their previous, lucrative jobs in the private sector to their relationships with the Armstrong family. Anne Armstrong, Katharine's mother, was on the board of Halliburton that made Dick Cheney its chief executive officer. Tobin Armstrong, Katharine's father, had financed Karl Rove & Co., Rove's political consulting firm. Katharine herself is a lobbyist for Houston law firm Baker Botts, a major Texas power broker since it was founded in the 19th century by the family of James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and close associate of George H.W. Bush's. . . .
Katharine Armstrong is linked to two family fortunes -- those of Armstrong and King -- that include extensive corporate holdings in land, cattle, banking and oil. No one in Texas, except perhaps Baker, but certainly not latecomer George W. Bush, has a longer lineage in its political and economic elite. In 1983, Debrett's Peerage Ltd., publisher of "Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage," printed "Debrett's Texas Peerage," featuring "the aristocrats of Texas," with the King family noted as the "Royal Family of Ranching." The King Ranch, founded by Richard King in 1857, is the largest in Texas, and its wealth was vastly augmented by the discovery of oil on its tracts, making the family a major shareholder of Exxon. The King Ranch is the model for Edna Ferber's novel of Texas aristocracy, "Giant."
John B. Armstrong, a Texas Ranger and enforcer for the King Ranch, founded his own neighboring ranch in 1882, buying it with the bounty of $4,000 he got for capturing the outlaw John Wesley Hardin. In 1944, almost inevitably, the two fortunes became intertwined through marriage. Tobin Armstrong's brother John married the King Ranch heiress, who was also a Vassar classmate of Tobin's wife, Anne, who came from a wealthy New Orleans family.
The Armstrong Ranch developed far-flung holdings in Australia and South America. Meanwhile, President Ford appointed Anne, a major Republican activist, U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, and President Reagan appointed her a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is reportedly Anne's best friend, and Anne was instrumental in launching her political career. Tobin, for his part, worked as an advisor to Texas Republican Gov. William Clements, where he first encountered the young Karl Rove and decided to give him a helping hand when Rove struck out in the political business on his own.
The Armstrong family's Republican connections have continued and strengthened down to the latest generation of Bushes. Gov. George W. Bush appointed Anne a regent of Texas A&M University and Katharine a commission member of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the agency that filed the report on the Cheney shooting. At Tobin's funeral last year, Cheney delivered the eulogy.