With regard to Texas politics, I’ve been relatively quite about the upcoming gubernatorial campaign to either return the current head honcho to office or to kick his butt out.  In fact, the only thing I’ve written about this year’s race shines a glaring eye on the woefully inept mathematical ability of one Kinky Friedman.

I blame lack of interest.

Don’t get me wrong though.  It’s just that the collection of corpulent sweater meat which aspire to occupy a constitutionally weak position here in the state of Texas fail to inspire me to assemble a collection of metaphors which are challenging and colorful enough to bother publishing as a featured article next to today’s Dilbert strip.  Frankly, I’d rather spend my time here at TharpSter.Org extolling the virtues of attention whoring squirrels and mysterious four month old trash piles which reside down the street.

Regardless, I’m going to take this opportunity to make another comment or two about the race.  The primary reason for my notes on the subject is that I feel that things have gotten to a point where it’s time for Rahm Emanuel to step in and say something.  Naturally, Emanuel will subsequently need to put in a call to Tim Shriver and the Special Olympics to apologize.

The Republican side of the race has gotten bad.  Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson wants to be governor now, and she’s looking to unseat two term incumbent Rick Perry.  The ads on the tube and the radio are malicious.  He blames her for this, she blames him for that.  You would think the two are in two different parties the way they criticize each other.  Needless to say, there’s no love lost between the two.

As an independent, I don’t vote in the primaries.  As such, I don’t have to worry about flipping a quarter for either of these two next month.  For that matter, polls are pretty much showing that our esteemed Senator will not garner enough votes to force a run-off for the nod from the state GOP.  It’s probably all the better when it comes down to it.  Compared to other states, Texas is in pretty good shape.  I have my own issues with both candidates; however the whole matter with these two has to be looked at as the baby and the bathwater.  I’m not inclined to throw one out with the other when it comes to pitting either Perry or Hutchinson against the guys on the other side of the ticket.

Speaking of which, here’s where it gets really good.  If the murkiness in the gene pool of candidates could be personified into one person this year, Farouk Shami would be your man.  Just for the record, I had to add “Shami” to my custom dictionary in order to get rid of the red squiggly line.  Among some of the flatulent rhetoric which has escaped the confines of that porous filter in his head which keeps him from saying the wrong thing, Shami promises 100,000 new jobs for Texans within his first two years in office.  If the plan doesn’t work, the hair care entrepreneur will resign and pay the state a cool $10 million. Along with the promise of a job, Shami intends to deliver free electricity to all.

Of all of the promises and claims which Shami has made, there was one specific utterance he made which got my attention and inspired me to break my moratorium on writing about Texas politics.  In a debate with opponent Bill White this last Monday, Shami made a comment about our neighbors just to the south while discussing the issue of immigration.  “Without Mexicans, you know, it’d be like a day without sunshine in our state,”

I’m not going to offer any smart ass remarks on that one.  I’m not going to point out the hypocrisy of the remark and what would have happened if a white Republican had said it.  Instead, I’m just going to reinstate my moratorium on discussing Texas politics for now.

Cheers to the sunshine.