Sunday, September 24, 2006

[kinky friedman] this issue just won't die

Friedman last week said he would provide $100 million to Houston, or any other city facing similar crime problems, so Houston could hire 1,200 new police officers to deal with crime and weed out the "crackheads and thugs" among the thousands of Katrina evacuees from New Orleans who relocated to Houston.Roundly criticized as a thinly veiled attack on blacks from Louisiana, Friedman said Wednesday his proposal "was not in any way racist.""How can you possibly regret that, telling the truth?" he asked. "I am not a racist, I am a realist. ... I never said what color their skin was. .... I'm smarter than that."

Yet on September 9, 2006, Guillermo X. Garcia with the San Antonio Express-News Staff reported on a question-and-answer session with Kinky and directly quoted him:

In answer to a question, Friedman said the comments do not indicate that he holds racist views. Rather, he said they demonstrate his ability to take on a subject the other candidates won't touch."Racism was here before I came around," he said. "I am just trying to bring up these issues within the (expletive) society."Later, he said: "As it happens, the crackheads and thugs who remain in Houston after Katrina happen to be black; that's fact."

This latest lie follows Kinky's previous lies about his past claims that he vote for Ann Richards and Al Gore and against the Constitutional Amendment rejecting equal marriage rights. Here is one such false claim:

Susannah McNeely: ... after your bid for Justice of the Peace in ’86, you said you were leaving “that worthless tar baby that is politics” to the young people. What happened that changed your mind and prompted you to run for governor of Texas?Kinky Friedman: Nothing changed my mind, that’s still correct. This is not a political campaign. It’s a spiritual one—a spiritual calling....SM: So does this idea of the honorable cowboy have anything to do with why you threw your support behind President Bush in this last election? You did, didn’t you?KF: Yes. I did in this last election, but I didn’t vote for him the first time.SM: Who did you vote for in 2000?KF: I voted for Gore then. I was conflicted. . .but I was not for Bush that time. Since then, though, we’ve become friends. And that’s what’s changed things.SM: So it’s your friendship with him that’s changed your mind about having him as president more than his specific political positions?KF: Well, actually, I agree with most of his political positions overseas, his foreign policy. On domestic issues, I’m more in line with the Democrats. I basically think he played a poor hand well after September 11. What he’s been doing in the Near East and in the Middle East, he’s handling that well, I think.

Kinky statements about his past votes have proven false based on Kinky's public Kerr County voting records:

"Quite often, I did not like my choices," Friedman was quoted as saying in Friday's Dallas Morning News...."The voting record doesn't look strong, but my voting record is better than Dick Cheney's," he said....According to Kerr County voting records, Friedman voted in the 2004 presidential general election but not in any other contest since 1994.

Vote Strayhorn or Bell, not Perry or Kinky.