As I pointed out earlier in the week, Democrats here in Texas Congressional District 22 have nominated an acolyte of left-wing political cultist Lyndon LaRouche to challenge Republican incumbent Pete Olson this fall. Kesha Rogers is, to say the least, a really strange character -- but given the obscurity of all three candidates in the race, I continue to argue that we have seen the same thing happen here that happened in Illinois in 1986 when Democrat voters nominated a pair of LaRouchies for Lt. Governor and Attorney General with generic names (Hart and Fairchild) over a pair of mainline Dems with ethnic surnames (Sangmeister and Pucinski) because nobody except political insiders really knew anything about the candidates.

But that points to a problem here in Houston -- the local media failed to devote any substantive time to a whole host of races in the run-up to the primary. I believe that had a lot to do with some regrettable results in the GOP primary, and it certainly did in the case of this Democrat primary race. After all, I just ran a search on the website of the Houston Chronicle -- and found precisely ONE article discussing Kesha Rogers in the last year. When did it run? Today, four days after the primary.

Kesha Rogers called for the impeachment of President Barack Obama as the centerpiece of her campaign for Congress, and on Tuesday she won the nomination of her party.

The Democratic Party.

It was no stealth campaign. Rogers shouted it from a sound truck that cruised the four-county 22nd Congressional District. She posted an 18-foot banner emblazoned with the message “Save NASA. Impeach Obama” on street corners. Her Web site is filled with videos and periodic policy statements documenting her stand.

During the campaign, Rogers denounced warnings of global warming as imperialist genocide, proclaimed that London banking interests are bent on ruining America's economy and accused Obama of “pissing on the legacy of President John F. Kennedy” in proposing to end NASA's Constellation program.

“I can't believe that most people who voted for her knew that she wants to” impeach Obama, losing candidate Doug Blatt states on his Web site. “I do believe that most of them didn't do any research about the candidates before voting.”

Interestingly enough, reporter Chris Moran (with whom I spoke this primary season regarding the Chris Daniel/Paul Dwight race for the Harris County Circuit Clerk nomination) fails to note that his own newspaper, along with the rest of the Houston media, ignored the CD22 race. Pete Olson was unchallenged on the GOP side, and the three Democrat non-entities seeking the nomination appeared as unlikely to win in November as the Dalai Lama is to be elected pope at the next conclave. So the local media simply ignored the race, even though one of the candidates on the Democrat side was a certified extremist loon who follows a man who can best be described as a political cult leader and convicted felon. But didn't the people have a right to know?

Too their credit, some local Democrat bloggers did try to get the word out -- but as one of them admits today, he and other Democrat leaders were incompetent in their approach to the CD22 race.

Keisha won on ignorance. The clubs and party in the area did little if anything to warn voters of her insane positions. She was also at the top of the ballot, the very first person you could vote for. So statistically she had an advantage. She had no campaign. No money. No plan. No field work. She was lucky. We were not.

John is exactly right -- ignorance was what led to the Rogers victory. But that ignorance was aided and abetted by the failure of the media to do its job of informing the people about the choices on the ballots. That led to a great many unfortunate results on election night, and this result constitutes Exhibit A in the case against the Houston media's political coverage of the 2010 primaries.