New Austin GOP Chair: Bat**** Crazy Or Agent Of Change?

AUSTIN, TX -- You might call him the Donald Trump of the South -- equally bombastic and unfiltered, lodging wild accusations sans evidence while offering up conspiratorial-minded theories steeped in intrigue.

He’s Robert Morrow, the newly elected Travis County GOP chairman. When the dust cleared from the frenetic pace of Super Tuesday and the final votes were counted, Morrow beat incumbent James Dickey with about 55 percent of the vote, as the Austin American-Statesman reported.

But now -- just a day after Super Tuesday -- the local GOP political establishment wants him out -- much like those in the upper echelons at the federal level desire to see their front-runner, Trump, go away.

While the rest of us political junkies spent Super Tuesday furiously trying to discern who won, separating the wheat from the chaff of the organized chaos that is Super Tuesday, Morrow was busy firing off his conspiracy theories on the Twitter.

A favorite target: Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and the Bush political family, the former of which Morrow alleges has a penchant for “...rampaging bisexual adulteries” while concurrently opining “...much of the Bush family should be in jail.”

And that’s Morrow just getting warmed up.

He and Trump both have been buoyed by their unfiltered candor, each tapping into an anger among the electorate for long-held and deep-seated grievances -- either imagined or with some basis. The ploy has been successful, as like-minded voters gravitate to the orbit of each man with their support at the polls.

One tweeting follower reflects the exquisitely nuanced nature of that support: “I feel more comfortable submitting my resolution regarding Texas secession now that we have a GOP chairman with some balls,” follower Yamamushi intones on Morrow’s Twitter account.

The GOP chairman has other targets on Twitter beyond Perry and the Bush family. Taken collectively, his Super Tuesday tweets yield something of a manifesto with the deliberate cadence of haiku in its word economy:

• “Bill Clinton’s troopers were quite the thugs back in Arkansas.”
• “One thing Bill Clinton and Donald Trump likely have in common: they raped their wives.”

• “I highly recommend Roger Stone’s book on the Bush Crime Family [capitalization his].”
• “Theories my ass. TRUTH that few others are too cowardly to tell.”
• “Roger Stone’s book indicting Lyndon Johnson is the best one on the JFK assassination.”

That last one helpfully offers a link to Amazon for book-ordering purposes.

Like Trump (also a target given the above reference), Morrow relies on media attention to secure free publicity. And like Trump, reporters are all too eager to accommodate him on that front.

One enterprising Statesman reporter reached out to him on his favored forum.

“Hi Robert, I’m a reporter w/ the Statesman,” her media request for an interview began. “Can you call me at….”

By morning, a profile of the enigmatic GOP chairman ran in the Statesman’s pages. The Texas Tribune also recently wrote its version, which Morrow, seemingly pleased with the exposure, retweeted.

Like the rise of Trump, Morrow’s trajectory is worrisome to his fellow Republicans. Indeed, from Austin to D.C., there’s an awful lot of hand-wringing going on as a result of both men’s political rises. In both their landscapes, members of their own party are trying to find ways to get rid of them.

“I’ve got six or seven different ideas of things I want to pursue to either remove him, force him to resign, persuade him to resign or seriously constrain his abilities to function as chairman,” Matt Mackowiak, vice chairman of the Travis County GOP, told the enterprising Statesman reporter in her post-Super Tuesday piece.

Mackowiak told the writer Morrow is a “...conspiracy theorist to the extreme,” calling his election on Tuesday night a “total disaster.”

By now, the Trump oeuvre is well-known: immigrants are rapists; China is laughing at us; the press is the enemy; the president’s secretly Kenyan and his political rival for the presidency, Sen. Ted Cruz, is similarly ineligible as a Canadian.

Oh, and that wall thing with Mexico. The one they would pay for; can’t forget that gem.

Morrow’s targets are equally laser-focused, intra-party and, shockingly, more salacious than even the Trumpster’s. More often than not, Morrow’s missives are delivered via Twitter.

“Google Jeb Bush Murder of CIA Drug Smuggler Barry Seal 1986 and you will learn a lot about Jeb Bush & Oliver North,” he urges his Twitter followers. That missive is just below his name on Twitter -- the space where usually tweeters put in biographical information or whimsical descriptions of who they are as people.

From there, everything is fair game, nothing sacred and no subject too sacrosanct or taboo.

The rest of you can keep Trump. For entertainment purposes here in Austin, we’ve got Morrow to keep us on our toes.