lubbockonline.com

More at link. The very pretty and very smart lady who wrote this is “my friend Carol” that I have mentioned several times at LGF.

Lubbock, Texas made the news today in Houston, Dallas, San Francisco, New York, most major news outlets and was even mentioned by a blogger in Sweden. Unfortunately, it wasn’t something of which we could be proud.   

Unless you’ve been residing in a cave, you’ve read Lubbock County Judge Tom Head’s unfortunate remarks made in a Fox News interview on August 21. In a justification for raising the tax rate, he wandered off into a diatribe of fantasy. Rather than misquote him or take his words out of context (as he claimed in his non mea culpa rebuttal to the media on Wednesday), I’ll quote directly from the article/video:

“Judge Head said he and the county must be prepared for many contingencies,one that he particularly fears, if President Obama is reelected.

From Judge Head: “He’s going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the UN, and what is going to happen when that happens? I’m thinking the worst. Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. And we’re not just talking a few riots here and demonstrations, we’re talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy. Now what’s going to happen if we do that, if the public decides to do that? He’s going to send in U.N. troops. I don’t want ‘em in Lubbock County. OK. So I’m going to stand in front of their armored personnel carrier and say ‘you’re not coming in here’. And the Sheriff, I’ve already asked him, I said ‘you gonna back me’ he said, ‘yeah, I’ll back you’. Well, I don’t want a bunch of rookies back there. I want trained, equipped, seasoned veteran officers to back me.”

He paints an imaginary dystopian scenario of Lubbock, Texas as Tiananmen Square with himself, the Judge Hero, standing in front of the tanks. No, it’s not a satire from The Onion; he really said it and meant it. It gets worse. He used his “flights of fancy” as a justification for a county tax increase; a terrifying scenario sure to frighten even the most lucid thinker into supporting the tax increase. His rationalization was a retread of the tired and trite WMD argument used by the Bush administration in 2002; remember the smoking gun in shape of a mushroom cloud?

Judge Head can protest all he likes, but his words border on sedition, the incitement of discontent or rebellion against a government. In the interview, he spoke of creating a militia to fight against our government. Those were foolish words.

Judge Head seems to be a magnet for controversy. You might remember that in 2009, he was in political hot water about offensive pictures and emails he posted on a public bulletin board in the Lubbock County Courthouse. One of the posters showed nine arrest photos of people wearing Obama t-shirts, accompanied by the text:           

            “Did you ever see anyone arrested wearing a Bush T-shirt, or for you older folks, an Eisenhower? Gerald Ford? Ronald Reagan? even Nixon? or any political t-shirt? There MUST be a message here, but I can’t quite grasp it, or maybe I’m afraid to.”

Above the pictures, a fake narration of a person waking up, putting on an Obama t-shirt, holding up a convenience store, buying drugs, and beating his wife. There were other articles, pictures and emails, including one that disparaged Justice Sotomayor; the entire collection consumed nearly all the available space on the board and all of it posted by Judge Tom Head.

I met Judge Head many years ago when I was a counselor at Cavazos. He presided over the attendance cases and family problems of our students. He did an outstanding job; buying alarm clocks for students who couldn’t make it to school on time and helping entire families find solutions to employment, financial and legal problems. I respected him a great deal. The Judge Head whose words I read today is the not the same Judge Head I knew then.

The extreme Right Wing of the Republican Party; the Eagle Forum and John Birch Society members, are poisoning what used to be a group of solid citizens just a few years ago. It’s like a scene from an old movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Like a viral contagion, judges, a certain Lubbock City Councilman, journalists, and radio hosts have been infected by the steady diet of rumors, lies, hatred and imaginary political horror stories of this darker side of humanity. Whether you believe it or not, there are actually thousands of individuals among us, Extreme Tea Party Conservatives, who believe in conspiracy theories involving the United Nations and Executive Directive 51 (signed into law by George W. Bush in 2007) that will somehow dissolve our country into a nation of liberal secular humanists with a Socialist government that will plot on behalf of a New World Order. Most of these conspiracy nuts are the same ones who harp on the right to bear and keep arms as a means of thwarting Executive Directive 51.

Sounds pretty nutty, doesn’t it? Apparently, it doesn’t sound foolish to Tea Party Conservatives, since these same notions are built into the Texas GOP Party Platform and espoused by Ted Cruz, the Republican candidate for Senate. He believes that the U. N. is going to destroy all the golf courses in America, with George Soros’ help, of course. The next thing we’ll hear from the Texas Tea Party is that the U.N. had something to do with the firing of Coach Leach.