I'm torn about covering this at all because it's so stupid. But that's kind of why I have to. The media are forever looking for creative ways to make it appear conservatives simply hate . . . whoever. Minorities. Gays. Muslims. If they can twist or contort something that happens so as to advance the "conservatives hate everyone but white male Christians" narrative, they will do it. And they'll take advantage of trivial news to accomplish that end.
Rick Perry blasts election of Texas A&M's first gay SGA president
This is all the more in play when we're talking about a Trump cabinet member, so perhaps Energy Secretary Rick Perry should have expected he'd get this type of treatment from the Houston Chronicle when he weighed in on the strange doings at his alma mater, Texas A&M.
Here's the background: The election for student government president came down to two candidates - Robert McIntosh and Bobby Brooks. Brooks is gay. McIntosh, who is not gay, got the most votes. According to the school's constitution, the guy who gets the most votes wins. There's no electoral college system or anything else of the sort.
So McIntosh is the new president, yes?
Why no. He's not. And why not? Well, you see, there was a problem with glow sticks.
Glow sticks? Yeah, glow sticks. Now, we'll explain that further below, but the Houston Chronicle wants you think Perry threw a fit simply because the gay guy won, which is why they ran a story titled "Rick Perry blasts election of Texas A&M's first gay SGA president":
U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, a former Texas governor and Texas A&M University student leader, said Wednesday the election of the first openly gay student body president was "stolen" from the candidate who received the most votes but who was disqualified because of election irregularities in a process that "made a mockery of due process and transparency."
In an extraordinary written submission to the Houston Chronicle's Editorial Board, the energy secretary also suggested that Bobby Brooks' victory was engineered by the Student Government Association in a quest for diversity on the traditionally conservative campus.
"What if Mr. Brooks had been the candidate disqualified?" Perry wrote. "Would the administration and the student body have allowed the first gay student body president to be voided for using charity glow sticks?"
Perry, who as an Aggie student was twice elected yell leader, called on the university's administration to "explain why they stood passively by while equal treatment was mocked in the name of diversity, and why they did not brief the Board of Regents."
Brooks was declared the winner in the campus election by the SGA even though he came in second in the vote count to Robert McIntosh, who was disqualified by student election officials for not providing receipts for glow sticks used in his campaign.
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When President Trump said the fake news media are enemies of the American people, this was exactly the sort of thing he was talking about
Now the way it looks to me, and presumably to Perry, is that the student election officials really wanted to advance Diversity! by having a gay SGA president, and they used an absurd technicality to disqualify the actual winner of the vote and make it happen. I suppose it's possible there is really a rule that you're disqualified if you don't turn in glow stick receipts, but if you've ever heard of anyone who won an election of any kind being disqualified for a reason like that, by all means let me know.
My point, here, is not to analyze the Texas A&M student election, because I really don't care about it. What I do care about, however, is dishonest attempts by the media to smear conservatives with nonsense headlines like this one. The headline clearly implies that Perry's problem with the election outcome was that the winner was gay. The story's lead suggests that as well.
Only when you get to the fifth paragraph in the story do you really understand the issue Perry was raising, and then you realize it had nothing whatsoever to do with Brooks being gay - except insofar as Perry suspects the desire to have a gay president might have been the motivation for tilting the playing field in his favor. But Perry is not objecting to the fact that a gay guy won. He is objecting to the fact that the gay guy really didn't win, but was handed the presidency anyway because of an absurd technicality.
If you think Texas A&M applied the rules correctly and you want to argue Perry's position is without merit, that's fine. But deal with his argument as it really is. It's not about the winner being gay. It's about the guy who won the vote according to the rules not being delared the winner. The Chronicle's headline is fake news, plain and simple. It's designed to give you an impression that's totally false about Rick Perry. And you have to work pretty hard in reading the story to find out that the truth is not what they want you to think it is.
When President Trump said the fake news media are enemies of the American people, this was exactly the sort of thing he was talking about. It wasn't about negative or critical stories. It was about things that are just patently false.
The Houston Chronicle doesn't even deserve to be in business if they're going to lie like this. Someone with the means to do so should buy them out and shut them down.
