In both 2015, and in 2016, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” posted profiles of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who in our first profile, we discussed his three terms as Texas Attorney General where he worked with Gov. Rick Perry, serving as one of the front line soldiers in the sorts of Fundamentalist conservative culture wars the state of Texas has fought against equality, and frankly, facts over the past decade and a half, including filing 27 separate lawsuits against the federal government in the first five years of the Obama presidency alone, once joking that his daily routine is “I go into the office in the morning. I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home.” The great majority of those legal challenges were obviously doomed to fail upon review by judges at some level, but that didn’t stop Abbott from filing them anyway to prolong a constitutional battle at of partisan spite at a cost of millions of dollars to Texas taxpayers. No ridiculous legal statute passed in Texas is beneath him, including his obsessive quest to make sure that dildos cannot be sold in the Lone Star State, but fighting tooth and nail to make sure that firearms can be purchased without a background check. In 2007, The Washington Post reported Attorney General Abbott declined to pursue charges against employees of a Texas youth prison who were sexually abusing underage inmates after a Texas ranger had sent e-mails to him with evidence and asking him to put a stop to the abuses for TWO YEARS. Greg Abbott is a man who violated the tenets of our very democracy to suit partisan ends by gerrymandering in his own state, and then sued when the Department of Justice tried blocking the racist policy by arguing it wasn’t racist, by pointing out it was just wholly partisan based on party affiliation, writing, ”DOJ’s accusations of racial discrimination are baseless. In 2011, both houses of the Texas Legislature were controlled by large Republican majorities, and their redistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party’s electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats.” Prior to the 2012 elections, Abbott threatened to arrest poll watchers from Europe, who were monitoring the ethics of American elections, and claiming there were “closely affiliated with ACORN” which was amazing because ACORN ceased to exist three years prior to the election. In 2016, he sued the federal government (and lost) because he didn’t want Texas to resettle any refugees fleeing Syria, and threatened to sue any Christian organizations that would, y’know, follow the Bible and take in refugees like it preaches.
Greg Abbott is also an opponent of all kinds of immigration, be it legal or otherwise, fights back against equal pay for women, is a gay reparative therapy supporter, and a climate change denier who is beyond “hands off” with giants of industry, arguing that the government should not regulate chemical giants and that if citizens wanted to be aware of what chemical agents were being used by them, they should just “drive around and ask”, and the companies would simply acquiesce. Gov. Abbott is hyper-partisan enough that he has been quoted saying that “Democrats are a more dangerous threat than North Korea” and has thanked supporters for referring to his opponent in the 2014 elections, Wendy Davis, as “Retard Barbie”.
Perhaps the most egregious example of Greg Abbott being a paranoid lunatic, though, was over the summer of 2014, when several radical conspiracy theorists, the kind who are avid fans of Alex Jones and InfoWars, were frothing at the mouth in fear of routine military exercises known as Jade Helm 15 that they, as kooks are wont to do, imagined to be a government invasion coming to take their guns away, ship them off to work as slave labor in WalMarts (as if WalMart needed any help with that) and impose Sharia Law upon the imprisoned populace. Abbott actually sent the Texas State Guard to “monitor” the activities of the joint exercise between the Green Berets and Navy Seals, our own armed forces, just in case they really were going to swoop in when no one was looking and conquer poor Texas (which is still already a part of our country). Unbelievably, Gov. Abbott decided to waste taxpayer money to keep a watchful eye on American troops to make sure they didn’t come for us all in the night, rather than just dismiss an insane conspiracy theory, that he seemingly also fell for (or exploited). Fast forward a few weeks, though, and after Texas had a series of storms that left the state flooded, Greg Abbott’s mistrust of the federal government was gone when he started asking for relief aid funding to be sent to his state. Because apparently, he also has the memory of a goldfish.
Gov. Abbott will be up for re-election in 2018, and he’s already hitting the fear-mongering hits by sending out fund-raising letters to warn of an “immigration coup”. Meanwhile, Abbott’s warning about how gun control will just lead to Hitler, when people asked about maybe changing Texas gun laws after a lunatic murdered a couple dozen people in a Sutherland Springs church, which maybe shows you his priorities are a bit f***ed up. We are almost certain we’ll have more strange outbursts from Abbott over the next year, as he tries to maintain his grip on power in Texas.
One Year Ago, November 22nd, 2016: Greg Abbott (TX)… 2016 Update
Two Years Ago, November 22nd, 2015: Greg Abbott (TX)… Original Profile
Three Years Ago, November 22nd, 2014: Mark Souder (IN)… Original Profile