Monday, December 04, 2017

Democrat Candidate in CD-36,Houston Resistance and Bad Night Twitter


Texas CD-36

It is not at all unusual for me to be scrolling through social media in the middle of the night. What can I say? Here's the thing, though. Night Twitter is different than Day Twitter. Something I noticed over the weekend was that local lefty fundraising efforts were aggressively over-the-top. It is common for political campaigns to use social media for fundraising efforts - I would argue it is mandatory - but Night Twitter brings out a strong whiff of desperation. 

The tax reform bill vote really got the political left - and their willing cohorts in the #NeverTrump universe - all wee-weed up. The phony outrage machine aptly illustrated the very basic difference in party philosophies - the left thinks your money is the government's, not yours. The left thinks the government will spend your hard-earned dollars better than you will spend them. 

You'll notice a common thread in all this: a real dependence on outside money and influence in Harris County politics for Democrats seeking to score victories in 2018.

Two efforts, in particular, caught my attention. The first was by the leftists in the Indivisible Houston crew. Twitter followers of this account were told of a rally to be held at City Hall as "The People Rally Against Robbery." The tweet included a re-tweet of a picture from a rally in Pennsylvania Sunday night. That rally was organized by MoveOn and the tweet came from the Soros-run operations in Washington, D.C. That's right - returning a very unremarkable amount of your own money in the form of a tax break back to your wallet is "robbery".

Along the way, Indivisible Houston mocked religious conservatives and also claimed a "chill in the air" as Senator Cruz promoted his filing for re-election in Houston (though it was only a photo op, as he has to file in Austin). All of the local Democrats and the local media (sorry for repeating myself there) were invited to the rally using their Twitter handles. Several tweets were put up simply using Twitter handles and that looks particularly lazy. Also, spelling isn't a strong suit, either. For instance, when calling out local area Republicans specifically over voting for the reform, Rep. McCaul is "McCall".

Then there is Dayna Steele, running in CD-36 hoping to take out Rep. Bruce Babin. She claims she's the one to "flip Texas blue". She is a former radio personality and what strikes me in her Twitter pleas is the number of tweets aimed at specific musical/entertainment celebrities who don't even live in Texas.
She wants her slice of the outsider money pie. She even throws her nephew under the bus - a Republican lobbyist, according to her claim - by tweeting that "even he" realizes the need for change. Such disdain for a young man of another political party and a relative, too! Imagine the holiday dinners in her family. David Crosby, Melissa Etheridge, Bette Midler, Sheryl Crow all make an appearance on her timeline. She loves her some Dan Rather and Matthew Dowd, too. Can her caricature of self-important leftist get any stronger? Yeah, probably. There is time. She did, after all, re-tweet someone labeling Trump as "America's version of Bin-Laden." I don't know - do the good people of CD-36 want a representative that doesn't know the difference between a murdering Islamic terrorist and a duly elected U.S. President?

Night Twitter would be really solid entertainment if it weren't so sad and desperate. And, in the end, I suspect really ineffective.