Looks like the gubernatorial campaign of my old summer camp counselor is picking up steam, and as a fellow Texan Jew, I am proud. So is Rachel, the Velveteen Rabbi. Alisa met him on the campaign trail in June.
Kinky Friedman may be an ageing hippie, but he's a cranky one. In fact, one could call him a muscular liberal."I don't understand how you can support Bush's policies. I'm told you grew up a Democrat. What happened?"
What did happen, I wondered, to the little boy who cried when Adlai Stevenson lost? What happened to the young man whose heroes were Abraham, Martin, and John? Time changes the river, I suppose, and it changes all of us as well. I was tired of Sudan being on the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations. I was tired of dictators with Swiss bank accounts, like Castro and Arafat and Mugabe, masquerading as men of the people. I was tired of Europeans picking on cowboys, everybody picking on the Jews, and the whole supposedly civilized world of gutless wonders, including the dinosaur graveyard called Berkeley, picking on America and Israel. As I write this, 1.2 million black Christian and Muslim Sudanese are starving to death thanks to the Arab government in Khartoum and the worldwide mafia of France, Germany, China, Russia, and practically every Islamic country on the face of the earth. What happened to the little boy who cried when Adlai Stevenson lost? He died in Darfur.It would be easy to see Kinky as a novelty candidate like Jesse Ventura, but that's not such a bad thing if the goal is to shake up a sclerotic system, and I think Kinky is a bit steadier than Ventura, despite his wisecracking. (In fact, you can attend a high-end fundraiser for Kinky and golf with him, Jesse, and Willie Nelson. Populism can be fun.)
(Crossposted at Kesher Talk)
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