Okay so here’s the deal.  If somebody runs for President and gets laughed out of the race (and you know that’s gotta be somebody from Texas after Rick Perry invented the category with “Oops!”), what happens to any campaign donations they have left over?

Well, the Federal Elections Commission wants to know, Ted Cruz.  Ted did not file his April or July quarterly reports for his presidential campaign funds and the FEC wants to know why.

I was going to post this yesterday but I got busy and I’m glad I did because Ted filed an answer. Remember: Ted does not make mistakes. He’s like Donald Trump and is always right. You can take a look at his creative writing to skirt around something by saying, “I’m special and not required to because of this nitpick.”

My opinion:  He’s running for president again but doesn’t want to say so and piss off Donald Trump.

Some stories keep coming around no matter how much you try to avoid them. This happened yesterday when it was reported that Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto tested positive for COVID-19. Being that the reporter suffers from multiple sclerosis, you’d imagine that he has already been fully vaccinated against the virus.

Fox News is a deep dive of depravity and contradiction all by itself. There has always been a schism between the hard news division and the commentary division. Cavuto comes from the hard news division. When you look at only the news division you see some examples of bias, but it doesn’t outwardly appear to be all that bad.

Then comes the commentary. Their prime time hosts rail against vaccine mandates, mask mandates, and safety protocols as if the Gestapo were marching in and strapping everyone down to the chair. Yet, news has been oozing out about Fox News themselves. Seems their corporate policy says something else entirely.

We start with the usual disclaimers and statements of concern for people like Cavuto. Like Colin Powell yesterday, he represents the moral gray area where most people reside. Sometimes it’s light gray and sometimes it’s charcoal. Yet, this gray area exists for people that know the truth, don’t outwardly speak against it most of the time, but also don’t speak against those that would distort the truth. Powell made a career of selectively speaking truth to power. His critics would say he let far too many things go in the service of gaining more power.

I don’t know Neil Cavuto. I don’t know what makes him tick. I’m guessing he enjoys cashing his paycheck every couple of weeks and that is understandable on a certain level. Yet, it is hard to take anyone seriously from a news agency that doesn’t consider itself a news agency legally. They have been taken to court before for reporting and commentary that has been less than accurate. Each time they’ve thrown out the defense that they are an entertainment company.

There is something to be said about people that know the truth, follow the truth in their own personal lives, and then speak the opposite in public. We can most assuredly add more to those that say these things for the mere purpose of garnering ratings and cultivating an audience for profit. Judas famously got his 30 pieces of silver for betraying Jesus. I suppose Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity have simply done a good job of negotiating on their own behalf.

In the old days, scholars asserted that heresy was the worst of sins. In that case, it was people preaching the absence of God. Yet, one wonders how horrible a sin it is to simply believe something different than the majority. In the case of COVID, an idiot can be forgiven his idiocy if that idiocy is his natural condition. In other words, if he really believes his rhetoric he is to be pitied and pat on the head.

What Fox News does is somehow worse than heresy. While it may be implied, the definitions of heresy do not overtly say whether the heretic actually believes the lie. Fox News definitely doesn’t. They all bask in the glow of their own vaccinations and somehow peddle “freedom” to the masses like rancid red meat you wouldn’t even feed your dog.

I haven’t read Dante lately. Perhaps he could tell us which concentric circle of hell that gets you into. There is no greater sin than to know the truth, live the truth, and then to speak against the truth for your own personal gain. There is no greater evil that exists in the world. There should be no greater punishment than what awaits you at the end. I’d love for that punishment to be on a Biblical level, but I’ll settle for a class action lawsuit.

Okay, so Texas Monthly, a magazine that takes itself far more seriously than anyone else does, asks the political question of the Month —

They wrote pretty near 10,000 words about it and gave DeSantis a 6 – 0 lead.

But, the honest and real answer?  Trump.

General Colin Powell passed away yesterday. Like many Americans these days, he passed away due to complications from COVID. Unlike many of those Americans, his death was complicated. He wasn’t going to be a Herman Cain Award nominee. He had been vaccinated. By all accounts, he had been careful. Unfortunately, he was recovering from cancer treatments and his body just didn’t have the immune system necessary to fight off the infection.

His death was as complicated as his life. In the case of most of these COVID deaths, you could easily say it could have been avoided. In most cases you could say it was a self-inflicted wound. In most cases you could chalk it up to arrogance and irresponsibility. Powell’s death can’t be placed in that category. His death became as complicated as his life. Legacies are usually not clean and his life is a reminder.

I imagine the first thing that comes to people’s minds is watching Powell stand before the United Nations and lie about weapons of mass destruction. It seemed credible at the time and a lot of that credibility was due to him. Once you surrender your credibility it’s hard to get it back. So, it is impossible to consider his legacy without considering that first.

Powell’s legacy is one of speaking truth to power most of the time. For some, most of the time simply won’t cut it. These days, most of the time is something we’d likely settle for. He was a registered Republican, but he hardly seemed like the usual Republican even back then. There was a brief, fleeting moment when we thought he might make a successful run for the presidency. That seems as distant a memory as our childhoods now.

In a moment of brutal honesty, we would readily admit that Powell is like many of us. Yesterday, we talked about civic religion. These stories intersect in the legacy we hope to achieve. When we all pass on it will be asked whether we lived a life of good or a frivolous life. For most of us, the answer will not be so simple. It wasn’t for him either.

How does one balance all of the good he did over the course of a career with one moment that may very well erase it all? It is impossible to know now how much he actually knew at the time. Did he honestly believe there were weapons of mass destruction? Had he been misled by those above him? Was he complicit in the biggest lie of the first decade of the century? We might never know the answer to that question.

What we do know is that there are some things we can never outrun. There are some things that a thousand or even a million good deeds can’t wash away. We can ask the same thing we always ask when any one us finally goes. On the balance, was the world a better place because we were here? In Powell’s case, that’s a hard one to answer.

Life is not a choose your own adventure book. We can’t go back and try the alternative story line. We also have no way of knowing if there was anyone available to stand up to the administration in that moment. That’s what makes legacies so hard. It’s also clear that he figured that out eventually. Maybe that is worth some points in the end and maybe it’s not. For me, it’s worth retaining his humanity until the very end.

Ted Cruz has a big world map in his rumpus room.  He sticks a pin in each country where he has pissed people off. He’s pretty much got it covered.  Well, except for Australia.

He took it as a personal challenge.  And, of course, he had success without even trying real hard.

And like his hero Donald Trump, Cruz conducts delicate international relationships with the learned hand of Twitter.

I love the Aussies. Their history of rugged independence is legendary; I’ve always said Australia is the Texas of the Pacific.

The Covid tyranny of their current government is disgraceful & sad.

Individual liberty matters.

I stand with the people of #Australia https://t.co/9elCF0KRA3

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) October 13, 2021

Michael Gunner responded …

Mr Gunner hit back, telling Mr Cruz that Australia had a duty to protect aboriginal Australians, “the oldest continuous living culture on the planet”, who have suffered from grievous infection rates this year.

Mr Gunner said: “Nearly 70,000 Texans have tragically died from Covid. There have been zero deaths in the Territory. Did you know that?

“We’ve done whatever it takes to protect the Territory. That’s kept us safe and free. We have been in lockdown for just eight days in 18 months. Our business and schools are all open.

Of course Ted knew that. He just didn’t care. His lies go unchallenged here because we just all normally assume that if it comes out of his mouth … it ain’t pure.

And y’all, one more thing.  Why does he have to ruin everything?  You wanna watch a whole city cringe? Hang this picture on one of the overpasses.

I’ve been trying to describe the sadness of the last five plus years and have failed to grab a hold of it. There’s a nastiness that wasn’t there before. There’s a meanness that wasn’t there before. There’s a cruelty that wasn’t there before. I think each of us understands more acutely than ever that the pain didn’t come from one man. That man has always been a reflection of us. The seeds of our discontent were sewn years before.

The images of whatever this thing is get placed into the child we are preparing for the world. It took me awhile to fully understand that we are not only preparing the child for the world, but we are also giving the world our child. The world becomes an accumulation of all of our children. It becomes an aggregation of those children. It becomes an aggregation of their attitudes. It becomes an aggregation of their hopes, their dreams, and their sacred honor. It becomes an aggregation of their kindness, grace, or lack of kindness or lack of grace.

Civic religion refers to the way we treat each other as people that share this space. Religion obviously has negative energy for some folks, but in this case refers not to a particular God, but a particular mode of thought. In short, it refers to a source for our energy and what it means to be successful in this world.

The hardest lesson we have attempted to teach our daughter is the difference between being kind and being nice. For the life of me, I don’t know if we are being successful. There’s a balance between allowing things to roll off your back and sticking up for yourself. The problem with our civic religion is that self has become way too important. If we are kind then we treat people with kindness, but we don’t allow others to push us around. That balance is nearly impossible to teach.

Since the 1970s, success has slowly but surely been redefined. What we are seeing today is a culmination of that changing definition. I was brought up believing that success was measured by the positive impact that we had on those around us. How many lives have we positively impacted? Have we left a positive foot print on the world? That changed and morphed into what we see today.

The “Me” Generation slowly turned into the “Me Me Me” Generation. Success became about accumulation. It became a measurement of stuff. It became a step on your neighbor if that’s what you need to get more stuff. It became a glorification of the individual. The last five or so years simply became a reflection. Our leaders are a reflection of us. This is what we’ve become. This is an aggregation of the world we’ve created. This is who we are.

We live in a world that measures success by the strength of our devotion. We live in a world that openly brags on those successes as if they are our own. Our civic religion used to say otherwise. It used to say that someone’s success was all of our success and someone’s failure was all of our failure. What happened to the least among us mattered as much as what happened to the greatest among us. The real measure of success comes not in the strength of that devotion, but who or what we are devoted to. If it is only ourselves it matters not how strong it is. It is misplaced anyway.