At a packed Travis County GOP executive committee meeting Tuesday night, it took less than a minute for someone to acknowledge the elephant not in the room.
“Give us wisdom to deal with the situation that we’re in,” Peggy Bower prayed during the opening invocation, to a chorus of quiet amens. “We pray this can be used as a lesson to everyone about how important it is to stay informed.”
Bower was referring to the recent election of Robert Morrow, the conspiracy theorist and author who won the Travis County GOP chairmanship in the March 1 election with a 55 percent majority. Morrow’s political beliefs — and non-stop stream of graphic tweets, which on Tuesday alone included references to bestiality and various Republican leaders’ sexual preferences — quickly attracted international attention.
Over the course of the two-hour meeting, which Morrow did not attend, Travis County GOP precinct chairs voted overwhelmingly to condemn “all profane or slanderous statements” Morrow made.
“The Travis County Republican Party seeks to raise the level of public debate,” the resolution read.
Although Morrow did not respond to the resolution specifically, he did tweet several pictures of women with what he described as “big titties” while the meeting was in session.
See here and here for the background. The Statesman has a few extra details and a copy of the Sternly Worded Letter than these folks wrote, which I have on good authority will surely frost Morrow’s cookies. Yes, I am enjoying all of this. The Press has more.
You can’t even make this stuff up!!! Crazy.
I have been around long enough to recall when local Democrats elected Claude Jones, a LaRouche supporter, as their county chair here in Harris County in 1988. How did they work around that problem?
I don’t think she won, but in the mid 1990s Harris County Democrats had a colorful candidate for chair, to quote a Houston Press book review: “would-be Harris County Democratic chair Leslie Perez, who as a male transvestite prostitute shot a man during a three-way sexual tryst, went to prison, escaped from a mental institution, was caught while playing Bobo the Clown in a carnival, did more time, adopted the name “Perez” from a prison lover, had a sex change operation and ran for party office in the guise of a Hispanic woman.”
Politics seems to attract an interesting breed, present company excepted.
Both the LaRouchie and Leslie Perez were before my time, as far as being actively involved goes. Much more recently, Bexar County had a similar issue with its Democratic Party chair. I’m pretty sure the solution in all those cases was for clubs and other organizations to do their own thing to support and promote candidates. Far from optimal, and that’s without taking Morrow’s flamboyant obnoxiousness into account as a negative factor, but it’s something.