Paxton Trial (Finally) Trots Out the Ladies for the Salacious Mistress Gossip

If you’re just joining us, read my recap from last week of the first couple of days of the Ken Paxton impeachment trial in the Texas Senate. If you’re not, and I’m sure if that’s the case you’re as sorry as I am … read on!

I’ve been answering Gallup surveys for years. They periodically email with questions about all manner of goings-on, and often in their general temperature-taking, they ask respondents to rate where we’re at, on a scale of one to 10, in terms of the “best possible” lives for ourselves.

Well, here’s where I’m at: This afternoon, I connected the Paxton impeachment trial live feed to the bluetooth speaker in my shower so I wouldn’t miss a single second of former staffer Katherine “Missy” Cary describing the internal chaos Ken Paxton’s affair caused in the Texas attorney general’s office.

Living every little girl’s dream. Exactly what I’d imagined when I checked out a book on Nellie Bly from the Alice Ponder Elementary School library in the second grade.

Speaking of little girls’ dreams: today the big boys let the wimminz have a go!

It was jarring, really, to hear women’s voices on a feed that has been dominated by fuming, bumbling men for going on five days. You might think that it’d be a nice break from the shrill panic of Paxton counsel Mitch Little; the man sounds like nothing so much as 6,000 terrified mice in a suit doing their best Ted Cruz impression at gunpoint. Something like the opposite of Disney’s Ratatouille.

Instead, it was a sad (but not surprising) display of just how powerfully entrenched the players in this charade are in the trappings of the unchallenged patriarchy of the Texas Legislature, and Texas politics writ large

Last week, I described the Paxton trial as an unmitigated dick-measuring contest, and the Who’s Your Daddy Show handled bringing women onstage just about how you’d expect. Of course these weenie-ass dudes would trot out the ladies to introduce the juiciest goss at the heart of Paxton’s criminal chicanery: the now-suspended attorney general’s relationship with his mistress.

The ladies in question: prosecution counsel Terese Buess (here’s a glowing lil blurb) and prosecution witness Missy Cary, a former AG staffer who testified that she overheard Paxton’s mistress airing his personal business in the Galaxy Cafe (I am hanging out in the wrong restaurants) and did damage control with staff not once, but twice, when Paxton admitted to the affair (IN FRONT OF HIS WIFE, IN HIS OFFICE) and, later, continued the dalliance despite being begged by his people to shut that shit down.

At first, I was genuinely surprised that Paxton’s defense team couldn’t manage to dredge up any woman lawyer in the whole state of Texas who would take on cross-examination. But then it occurred to me that to Team Paxton, whose dial is set to Asshole Eleven at all times, probably didn’t clock that having Tony Buzbee, a walking, talking, rootin-tootin’ advertisement for taking it easy on the self-tanner, berate and harass Cary would be a bad look.

Cary gave cool, measured testimony. She expressed real empathy for Angela Paxton, the state senator who has been barred from voting on Paxton’s guilt with the jury of her literal peers, but who is still attending each day’s proceedings while her husband’s name is dragged hither and thither. Cary testified that Angela Paxton attended a meeting at the AG’s office with her husband where he revealed the affair to staff, that Cary hugged Sen. Paxton during the ordeal, and Cary said her “heart broke” for the senator and the embarrassment AG Paxton had caused her.

It’s almost — almost — enough to make a person feel bad for Sen. Angela “Pistol-Packin’ Mama” Paxton. But if an asshole tree cheats on his asshole tree wife in the asshole woods, does it make a sound?

I didn’t hear anything.

Despite Cary’s collected approach to a sensational subject, Buzbee attempted to disarm her as soon as he began cross-examination, telling her she looked “nervous.” But Cary didn’t look nervous to me when she volleyed Buzbee’s nonsense back at him time and time again, most notably when she called his question about whether she attended church “inappropriate.”

Neither did prosecutor Buess seem at all flapped during the proceedings, even when Buzbee raised his voice to accuse her of “yelling” after she calmly asked to be able to finish a question over his aggressive tizzy of objections. Neither did Margaret Moore, the Democratic former Travis County prosecutor, get her feathers ruffled by Buzbee’s hysterical allegations that she was complicit in the vast RINO conspiracy to unseat Paxton, instead reacting with almost bemused remove at his bluster.

The men of the Paxton trial have, on both sides, been in a frenzy since day one. They have nothing on Abigail Williams. They holler, they pontificate, they pound their fists, they sigh elaborately, they showboat. Their emotions — especially for Paxton’s ridiculously, performatively self-pitying defense — have carried practically every moment of the proceedings. Hell, Ryan Vassar, a former Paxton aide and prosecution witness, literally cried on the stand!

And yet these chucklefucks have the nerve to accuse the women who’ve been dragged into this thing — as much as any man has been dragged into it — of being nervous, of yelling, of acting out of order.

I have no particular love for the ladies of the Paxton trial; I voted against Moore, a centrist Dem, in 2020, and anyone who can manage to give Angela Paxton a hug is suspect in my book. But it’s clear that the women involved in this trial so far are deeply experienced at managing the out-of-control behavior of the men who believe they are running the show — and who believe they are entitled to run every show.

The brief appearance of three women at the Paxton trial today (the first women to say full sentences on the record in five days of testimony) only underscores the extent to which the self-aggrandizing wannabe-Daddies of the Texas GOP will huff and puff — until, perhaps, they blow their own house down.

Join Home with the Armadillo readers for live-chats of the Paxton impeachment trial — assuming the day-drinking doesn’t kill us in the process. We’ll be online every day that I’m able to keep an eye on the live feed, so check in!