I think we may have found someone to replace Sarah Palin. On Monday, she made an appearance at a Fort Worth, Texas forum for candidates running to serve on the State Board of Education:
It began when North Richland Hills’ Lady Theresa Thombs, self-described Dame of Justice, “accomplished guest soloist, and “international evangelist,” ambled up to the microphone. She wasted literally no time before she started lobbing bombs at her fellow candidates, accusing Hardy of being a “life-long Democrat,” and Mahroum of being forced by the state attorney general to pay child support. Her bare-knuckle approach to politics earned her a smattering of boos. Thombs held up her hand for quiet and doubled down. “I have a Republican opponent who has children by two different mothers and owes child support.”
Next, she accused him of fabricating his college degree, eliciting another round of jeers from an irritated audience. But the coup de grâce was this: “You know, his real experience in management is Chuck E. Cheese.”
Mahroum would later insist to The Fort Worth Star-Telegram that he is, in fact, a regional trainer for the novelty pizza chain.
Once she’d finished with her fellow candidates, she took aim, albeit briefly, at the subject that had ostensibly motivated her candidacy in the first place. History, she stated, should be written by “experts, not people from socialist higher education.” As far as the sciences go, “We know we didn’t come from monkeys!”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she began in summation. “They’re using your tax dollars to brainwash our children into socialist issues and ideas and it is time for it to stop. Common Core and every single shred of CSCOPE has got to go.”
It gets worse:
The campaign website itself, which has since been revised, was a thing to behold. In it she pledges to fight “adgendas and ideoligies,” and to “stem the tide of our best and brightest teachers leaving the classroom to pursue other carriers, because they can no longer live with the policies and mandates they no are harmful to their students.”
It gets much worse.
Dare we ask, “is our children learning”?
Yoiks. Did you happen to catch how that Dallas Observer blog categorized this entry among their posts:
I’m fascinated by her name. Is her first name really “Lady” or is it some title she bestowed upon herself by belonging to some club of people that like to believe they’re members of an aristocracy? Either way it seems to fit her.
It looks like “Lady” Theresa M. Thombs title owes to this line in her campaign biography:
I found scarce reference to “Sovereign Order of the Faithful Knights of Justice” beyond their own web site, but according to their FAQ, they are a dues-collecting fraternal organization with about 1,200 members. Initiation requires a reference from member and a sliding-scale fee, and bestows the title of “Knight or Dame of Justice”, along with the style of “Sir” or “Lady”.
The problem with Lady Theresa’s opponents, and the problem with all people who believe in evolution and a factual representation of history, is that they are all lieurrs, immorrell and stoopid.
Thanks for the Sunday morning laugh, Boo.
The Orly & Lady Tour
There’s no more point in mocking the spelling than in mocking the name. We are now in the post-literate age and may as well get used to it.
Can we back down from the privileged classism to look at some real issues here. And the self-described Dame of Justice’s web site spelling and throw-back anti-evolutionism are the least of those issues.
This is a campaign for the State of Texas School Board. Until recently the State of Texas School Board textbook choices dictated a lot of the school textbook market in the US. The fact that the crazies want to capture and keep that School Board reflects its national important in national debate and practice. Dame of Justice’s whole pitch shows the intent of these people for the operation of the School Board. She is seeking support from people who want to gain control back over the textbooks that their children and the children of the nation use to learn history and science and literature and… Take the agenda of these people very seriously; it is being nutured in churches still fighting the Englightenment and it is being nurtured by the GOP as a wedge issue to divert from the economy.
The idea of democracy means that in principle any citizen is qualified by that fact alone to serve in public office if so chosen. What is striking is how a lot of the “crazies” can master the procedural ins and outs of government, an institution they claim to despise. One suspects some degree of feigned sloppiness on the part of the Dame of Justice. If she is mounting a statewide campaign, she has some personal and financial supporters.
But what you are seeing here is growing anger at the top-down Washington “accountability” programs–No Child Left Behind, Race To the Top, Common Core Curriculum that are being mandated on local school systems through state politicized education with increasingly smaller of amounts of federal, state, and local money. These people seek to capture a generic anger with education and direct it to their own agenda. Progressives and Democrats better start paying attention to this anger and ask for the firing of Arne Duncan and abandonment of the corporatizing and privatizing of education and a return to locally controlled common public schools that do not require multi-million-dollar administrators to run. People are angry at the closings, the consolidations, the waste, and the rising salaries of the “experts”.
If we really want progressive policies, it is time to stop amusing ourselves and get down to the business of winning over the people who might be attracted to the Dame of Justice’s shtick.
That takes doing what Dame of Justice is doing. (1) Talking bluntly about the issues and an analysis of the issues that will get her target audience nodding. Telling the truth that her target audience is experiencing and then moving the conversation in her direction. (2) Tossing out red-meat terms like her characterization of her opponent’s expertise. (3) Keeping the mechanics of presentation sophisticated enough to honor the intelligence of everybody but not so overproduced as to assert class privilege.
If you want to turn Texas blue, you have to address education in a Texas way that goes beyond the usual educated and progressive enclaves. You’ve got to move oilpatch workers in West Texas and people in Tyler, Waco, and Amarillo and the suburbs of Dallas-Fort Worth. And you have to be clever enough not to let passion over education get side-tracked into a phony evolution controversy.
After progressives win that battle, then they might thank the Dame of Justice for an empirical test of whether humans came from monkeys and offer to share a banana with her.
I don’t know if I should laugh or cry at what she represents.