LaRouchebags

Pity the poor Texas Democratic Party, which feels obliged to renounce one Kesha Rogers, who took fifty-two per cent of the vote in the three-way split that was the primary for the twenty-second Congressional District, and who is a supporter of Lyndon LaRouche. Gubernatorial matters are such that this result was probably not caused by mischievous Republican cross-voting. Rogers stands little chance of winning the seat. But even so.

However, it must be said that at least the LaRouche faction is nothing more than an oddity within the Democratic Party. Across the aisle, its denunciations of healthcare as "fascist" and its depictions of Obama with a Hitler moustache are mainstream, perhaps now even normative. People who believe in "al-Qaeda", or in "the global terrorist network", or in any connection between Iraq and 9/11, or in WMDs in Iraq, or in such WMDs as a threat to America (or Britain) even if they had existed, or in an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, or in such a programme's threat to America (or Britain) even if it existed, are in fact precisely as sane, and precisely as fit to be allowed anywhere near the running of anything, as are those who believe the fantasies of LaRouche about the British Royal Family or the City of London. The neocons do in fact harbour a profound hatred of "the Anglophile network", such that they wish to control Britain ruthlessly while aggressively Americanising her, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, though obviously without representation in Congress or the Electoral College.

Nor are Democrats in any position to gloat that, while both parties have Crazies, the Democratic Party can contain them while the Republican Party has been taken over by them. Although that is true in itself, the Democrats need to ask themselves how and why anyone who wants to vote to end the bailouts, to restore Glass-Steagall, to bring home the troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, to invest in key infrastructure, and in the Houston area specifically to maintain funding of NASA, cannot automatically do so simply by voting for a mainstream Democrat, who in Texas would combine the best of the Populists and the Farmers' Alliance with the best of the Texas Tories.