The air in this Houston airport bar smells like regret and industrial-grade disinfectant. It’s three in the afternoon, which means the sun out on the tarmac is a savage, malevolent god cooking the world in its own juices. Inside, the chill is so artificial, so aggressively ‘not-outside’, that my teeth ache. I’m staring into the blue-light abyss of my phone, doomscrolling through the day’s digital effluvia, when a headline claws its way through the brain rot and sinks its teeth into my frontal lobe.
Steve Stockman is running for Congress. Again.
I have to read it twice. The name triggers a vague memory, a ghost from the before-times, a half-forgotten punchline from the political freak show’s earlier seasons. The dateline says December 10. This is fresh madness. This is now.
Steve Stockman: A Convicted Felon’s Shocking Texas Comeback
For the uninitiated, Steve Stockman isn’t just some washed-up politico looking for a second act. This is a man who was convicted on 23—count ‘em, ‘twenty-three’—federal counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. He was sentenced to a decade in the iron cage for running charities as his personal slush fund, a scheme so brazen it was almost performance art. This isn’t some murky ethics violation; this is old-school, straight-to-the-bone grift. He was, for a brief, electric moment in American history, a convicted felon. Then, in the twilight hours of a dying administration, the Great Pardoner waved his magic wand, and poof. The slate, if not clean, was at least power-washed enough for another run.
And now he wants to go back. Back to the swamp he was so ceremoniously ejected from. Once dubbed Texas’ “weirdest lawmaker,” a title that in this state requires a truly feral commitment to the bit, he has declared himself rehabilitated and ready to serve.
I take a long, slow pull of my watery, overpriced beer. The bartender, a woman with eyes that have seen the heat death of a thousand suns, doesn’t blink. She’s seen weirder, I’m sure. This is Texas.
The Uncut Audacity: Stockman’s ‘Political Persecution’ Ploy
The truly beautiful, the transcendentally insane part of the story, is Stockman’s explanation. It’s not a mea culpa. It’s not a plea for forgiveness. It is, instead, a vibe check on reality itself. He recasts himself not as the perpetrator, but as the prey. He was, he claims, the target of a “historic and unprecedented political persecution” orchestrated by President Barack Obama and his “extremist henchmen.”
I set the phone down on the sticky bar top and just stare at the quote, shimmering in its digital cage.
‘Extremist henchmen.’
Jesus Christ. The sheer, uncut audacity of it. The man’s own staffers went to prison for their roles in the scheme. The indictments landed months after Obama had left the White House for good. But facts are just inconvenient little gnats in the face of a good story. And in the late-stage American political arena, victimhood is the only story that sells. He’s not a criminal; he’s a martyr. He wasn’t convicted; he was crucified. The Department of Justice wasn’t upholding the law; it was a legion of demons sent by the previous administration’s ghost.
Beyond Shame: The New Political Playbook for Rebranded Scandals
This is the new playbook. Shame is dead. Accountability is a quaint relic, like phone booths or trusting the government. You don’t apologize for your sins; you rebrand them as battle scars in a holy war. As one political science professor in the article notes, polarization gives these guys a chance to “use that scandal as evidence in an ideological war.” It’s not that he did anything wrong. It’s that the ‘other side’ is so evil they had to frame him. It’s a logic so perfectly circular, so hermetically sealed against reason, that it’s almost admirable. It’s a political perpetual motion machine powered by pure spite.
And the stage is perfectly set for his resurrection. He’s running in a newly gerrymandered district, a slice of political real estate carved out with surgical precision to be a safe space for exactly this kind of phantom. The lines on the map have been redrawn to create a habitat, a nature preserve for the politically endangered weirdo, ensuring that the local ecosystem is free of the predators of moderation and independent thought.
The Zombie Candidate: A Glimpse into Terminal Political Decay
This isn’t a comeback story. It’s a zombie movie. It’s the story of a political body that refuses to stay dead because the ground itself is poisoned. We are living in a terminal state of decay where the normal rules of cause and effect no longer apply. A man can be exposed as a charlatan, convicted by a jury of his peers for stealing from the very people he purports to champion, and still shamble back to the podium, wrap himself in the flag of persecution, and ask for the keys to the kingdom.
I finish my beer and signal for another. The blue light of the phone feels like a low-grade radiation, rewriting my DNA, eroding my ability to be surprised. Stockman is just a symptom. A particularly grotesque one, sure, but a symptom nonetheless. He is a glitch in the matrix that reveals the source code is hopelessly corrupt. The political freak show isn’t a sideshow anymore; it’s the main event. It’s the only event. And the clowns, the charlatans, and the power-hungry reptiles aren’t just running the asylum. They’re tearing it down, brick by brick, and selling the rubble back to us as sacred relics. And the scariest part? People are buying.
More from the political freakshow? Peace is Hell and Other Televised Lies.
Leave a Comment