
The malicious lying and conspiracy ranting that shitler employed so effectively to rile up and control his MAGA base, is common practice within the GOP. Shitler, thankfully, is out of office but that doesn’t mean his style of politics is going anywhere. In fact, it’s as popular as ever. Take Texas Governor Greg Abbott as the most recent example.
In the midst of the horrific crisis afflicting his state, Abbott managed to find the time to go on Sean Hannity’s unhinged opinion show to spread lies about the cause of the disaster. Doesn’t he have better things to do right now?
Apparently not.
The San Antonio Current has a nice round-up of Abbott’s conflicting statements.
On Monday, February 15, he tweeted a statement about natural gas, coal and nuclear facilities being compromised by the frigid weather.
While some Texas wind turbines did freeze during the storm, failures at natural gas, coal and nuclear facilities caused roughly twice as much power loss as issues with renewables, officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator said during a Tuesday press conference.
Abbott himself knows this, having sent out out a tweet on Monday that chalked up the blackouts to failures at natural gas and coal plants.
“Texas Gov. Greg Abbott lies on Fox News about cause of the state’s power outages”, San Antonio Current, February 17, 2021.
The very next day, Tuesday, February 16, Abbott was on Sean Hannity’s propaganda outlet blaming the catastrophe on renewables.
During a Tuesday appearance on right-wing TV personality Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, the Republican governor erroneously claimed renewable energy failures were responsible for statewide blackouts. The situation, he added, was proof that the Green New Deal championed by Democrats would be a “deadly deal” for the country.
“Texas is blessed with multiple sources of energy, such as natural gas and oil and nuclear, as well as solar and wind,” he said. “But you saw … that our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10% of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis.”
“Texas Gov. Greg Abbott lies on Fox News about cause of the state’s power outages”, San Antonio Current, February 17, 2021.
The root cause of the Texas grid failure can’t be blamed on any one form of energy or another. It was the failure to weatherize power generating facilities. Extreme cold is not unheard of in Texas. They get a hard winter every ten years or so.
The failure certainly cannot be blamed on the usual MAGA villains. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) and her Green New Deal policies had nothing to do with it. Texas was warned to winterize facilities in 2011 after similar failures. They didn’t do it. Besides, the Green New Deal hasn’t even been implemented yet. It may never be. At this point, it’s just a proposal.
Right now, it seems that those areas of Texas which are served by interconnected grids – where weatherization was required and completed – suffered fewer outages. It’s plain common sense that utilities who took the steps to prepare for winter weather, would get through it better. It’s not a political thing. It’s not a left-right thing. It’s an ant-grasshopper thing.

There hasn’t been a Democratic governor of Texas since 1995. The state legislature has been majority Republican since the early 2000’s. The ERCOT grid is self-contained within the state of Texas. It is not subject to Federal oversight. Texas Republicans will have a hard time passing the buck on this one but that doesn’t mean they won’t try.
The problem isn’t that Republicans are any less capable and competent than Democrats. The problem is that MAGA-world political realities require Republican politicians to parrot nonsense in order to satisfy their base and stifle doubts that might lead MAGA’s to seek out alternative leadership.
But all the lies that keep the MAGA base in line also inhibit the ability of Republican leaders to grapple effectively with real-world problems. I guess that’s why Senator Ted Cruz decided to go on vacation in Mexico in the middle of the catastrophe. After all, he can lie from anywhere.