In Texas and several foreign states, there are three guys, all related, and all named pretty near the same.

Here’s the backstory:

 Roque “Rocky” De La Fuente, who has run for president in the past as a Democrat, is running for president this year (including in the Texas primary) as a Republican. He also has run for Senate, simultaneously and unsuccessfully, in several of the several states.

His son, also Roque “Rocky” De La Fuente, following in Dad’s footsteps, is among 18 candidates (including four who’ve dropped out) on this year’s Texas Democratic presidential primary ballot. I’ll let you decide whether either of the De La Fuentes is a rogue Roque.

So, it is possible, weirder things have happened, that we have a November election consisting of a Democrat named Rocky De La Fuente vs. a Republican named Rocky De La Fuente.

Daddy Rocky is also running for a congressional seat as a Republican in California.

But, it gets leaky here … Daddy Rocky has another kid, named Ricky.  Ricky De La Fuentes is running for congress in both California and Texas. States with lax residency laws will let you do that.  He’s running as a Democrat against his Dad in California and as a Democrat against no family member in Texas, which seems to take some of the sport out of it.

Glen Maxey puts a translation lid on it in the Austin American Statesman.

Political dynasty – hey, it couldn’t be worse than the Trump family.

Thanks to everybody for the heads up.

In early 2018 Steve Bannon gave away the entire game plan for Trump in an interview with Michael Lewis of Bloomberg News.  In that interview, Bannon said a lot of things, but summed up his entire strategy in this one sentence:

“The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

That’s it.  That is the entire strategy for TrumpWorld.  Not surprisingly, that’s Vladimir Putin’s strategy, too.  In fact, he’s the guy who perfected it.  In the bad old days of Soviet communism, propaganda was directed in monolithic terms.  The government had it’s own version of truth, and repeated it 24/7.  But that stopped working as the few large media outlets lost the volume battle to alternative sources of “news” and with the rise of social media.  Putin’s strategy now is to confuse and contradict so much that people get numb to it all and start believing that the truth is unknowable.  In his new book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Peter Pomerantsev describes this strategy in the modern Russia which is now completely controlled by Putin.  Putin controls all the mainstream media in the country, and his military hacks into social media around the globe to spread the same misinformation used to control his own people.

The Bannon/Trump strategy keeps Americans off balance by spewing a mountain of bullshit on a daily basis which is why you hear Trump complaining about everything from low water use toilets to windmills killing millions of birds.  He’s done it at least 16,000 times since he became president, and his entire group of enablers from Giuliani to Kellyanne do it in a continuous stream.  There is so much bullshit that people are exhausted trying to keep up, and those he has brainwashed amplify the amount of bullshit circulating television, radio, and social media, repeating said bullshit millions of times.  They did it to Hillary with the debunked uranium story, and they’re trying to do it to Biden right now with the false Ukrainian corruption fiction they’ve whipped up.

The strategy works almost flawlessly.  This is how you get Trumpists, in the face of a tsunami of evidence that Trump illegally extorted Ukraine for his own political benefit, deny he did, and if he did, they say “so what?”    Think about it – what used to be headline news just ten years ago is now just a little dust you brush off your sleeve.  The disinformation is so perfectly delivered and maintained that people actually believe that everyone, including all of the mainstream press, all Democrats, all nonpolitical people, intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and the courts are lying.  The ONLY source of truth is Donald Trump and his talking heads.  Confusion propaganda is designed to sideline the truth and convince otherwise normal people that the only way to get unconfused is to believe only one leader who, in his “great and unmatched wisdom” is the only person to know true truth.

This is how democracy is destroyed.  When the people no longer trust the system, especially when it comes to voting, the news, and the common good, then the bad guys win.  Trump, Bannon, Giuliani, and the rest of the criminals in TrumpWorld want you to be stupid.  And they keep you stupid by feeding you mountains of bullshit. When you believe that bullshit, he’s got you, and you then virtually can’t be saved.

Trump’s normal response to one of his inner circle being indicted/convicted/named as one of his accomplices is, “I don’t know him, I don’t know what he does, blah, blah, blah.  It’s his trademark Throw Your Friends Under the Bus strategy.  This week, he did it again with Lev Parnas, indicted for campaign finance laws, when he started singing like a canary about his role in trying to frame Joe Biden over fabricated corruption charges.

Trump immediately declared that he didn’t know Parnas.  Sure.  He never heard of him –

President Donald Trump standing with Lev Parnas at the White House in Washington.

Here’s Trump’s normal response to being caught in a lie as applied to Lev Parnas:

Back when Ken Starr was trying to impeach Bill Clinton for getting a blow job, my Aunt Bessie was flabbergasted. “Of course he lied about sex,” Aunt Bessie proclaimed, “that’s what a southern gentleman does.”

Ken Starr and Friend

The next time I heard about Ken Starr, he had been named chancellor of Baylor University.  During his tenure, a scandal broke out.  Baylor went deeply into debt for a fancy new football stadium and drafted hot shot players right out of high school. Sounds like a plan, right?, because the hot shot players started winning and filling the expensive new stadium.

One small problem. Some of the best players began raping Baylor coeds.  In a 2017 lawsuit, victims suing the university alleged that from 2011 to 2014 at least 31 football players committed at least 52 rapes.  All the adults at Baylor refused to do anything about it.  They allowed it to continue.

The buck stops at Ken Starr’s desk.  I guess if Clinton had just been a football player instead of president.

So, today when I heard that Trump named Ken Starr to his defense team, I knew for a dead certain guaranteed fact that there is a pee-tape.

Mark my word – it’s real.  However, at this point, it may be the least disgusting thing that Trump has done.

Martha McSally, the Trumpist right winger from Arizona who former astronaut Mark Kelly is challenging, stupidly fumbled on national television this morning by insulting CNN reporter Manu Raju, when he asked her if the Senate should consider additional evidence in Trump’s impeachment trial.  Instead of just answering the question, she retorted, “Raju, you’re a liberal hack.  I’m not talking to you,” and stormed past him.

Suddenly, Mark Kelly started trending on Twitter.  Kelly is a formidable candidate, and doesn’t need her making an ass of herself on national television, but it damn sure helps.  Have a look.

This morning the GAO announced its finding that, by withholding military aid to Ukraine against the appropriation passed by Congress, Trump violated federal law.  In issuing it’s opinion, the GAO said, “OMB withheld funds for a policy reason, which is not permitted under the Impoundment Control Act.”

Cue the noise machine, which has already started.