Greg Abbott: Arrogant, Dangerous, and a Craven Hypocrite

There it is, in case you were wondering what I think about him. I wouldn’t want you to have to read between the lines.

Did you read the entire Dallas Morning News article I linked to in my last blog post yet? If not, you really should. Here’s the link again. Seriously, read it.

If you did, post a link to it on Facebook & tweet it out, too, so your fellow Texas voters can read it as well.

If you don’t have time to read it, let me pull out the most illuminating facts:

Abbott, who claims his office is concerned about voter fraud, does not keep records or statistics about voter fraud:

In response to requests from The News, the attorney general’s office provided a list of 637 potential violations of the Elections Code referred to Abbott since he took office in late 2002.

Strickland said he could not say how many were investigated or how many involved alleged voter registration fraud. “The office does not ‘compile or keep statistics,’” he said.

How can you say something is a problem if you can’t say why?

Maybe it is because you have a vested interest in destroying the evidence you might have?

When Haver [one of the people interviewed during Abbott’s investigation] was interviewed by Abbott’s office in late 2010, her attorney asked if Haver could get some folders returned to her. They’d been taken in the Houston raid and contained research Haver had done on possible irregularities in how GOP officials in Harris County were handling voter registration.

Haver told the attorney general’s office that the research had no relationship to the Houston Votes investigation.

“We kept following up, and they kept giving us the runaround about getting it returned,” she said recently.

In late 2013, Abbott’s office asked judges in Harris and Travis counties for permission to destroy the records seized in the two raids. The request said records contained the names of people who were not suspects, partial Social Security numbers and forged voter registration applications.

When the attorney general’s office received a green light from judges, Haver’s research, which did not contain personal identifying information, was among the materials destroyed.

The research didn’t contain the information Abbott’s office claimed it needed to protect—names, Social Security numbers, or voter registration applications.

It might have contained information about irregularities in voter registration activities of elected officials in Harris County, the very thing that Abbott’s office seemed to be concerned about investigating when they went after Houston Votes.

But there, of course, is the difference. Those elected officials are members of the same party as Greg Abbott.

Time after time, Abbott has demonstrated that the rules apply one way for him, and another way for the rest of us.

He championed tort reform, drastically limiting the amount someone can recover in a personal injury trial after he, himself, recovered a very large settlement in a personal injury trial. Remind yourself of the details here.

He drilled his own well to water his lawn while the city and county he lives in suffered from a drought that continues to this day. Soak up the full story here.

He willfully and recklessly destroyed records and refuses to keep statistics about potential voter fraud while championing a law that nonpartisan experts have shown not only disenfranchises minority voters, women, and students, but also targets only the rarest type, and least effective form of, voter fraud (in person voter impersonation).

Greg Abbott wants to be governor so he can take care of Greg Abbott, as well as a few campaign contributors of his who want to continue running their predatory lending businesses without any oversight, building their dangerous chemical storage facilities next to nursing homes and residential neighborhoods without disclosing what, exactly, is being stored, and pillaging our natural resources without regard for the safety of our citizens or water supply.

Dangerous, arrogant, and a craven hypocrite. Ladies and gentlemen, what are you doing to make sure this man does not become governor?

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