Well I appreciate the thought Texas, but you will have to do better than that! I mean seriously, WTF?
Rick Perry, or "Governor Good Hair" as Molly Ivins referred to him, may be perhaps the most dangerous Teabagger in the Republican party at this point in time.
He is George W. Bush with fewer functioning brain cells, Rick Santorum with even more hatred toward women, and Sarah Palin with slightly larger clitoris.
In other words he is all of the bad fixins of the Tea Party, rolled up in a spicy Texas tortilla, and molded to look like George Bush if he had his Id set free after shotgunning Dr. Jeckyl's potion.
But the slack jawed, knuckle dragging, dimwit is more than just a simple minded, anti-government, secessionist, with a chimp like face.
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| "How come everybody always looks at me like that when I say Evolution's not real?" |
Perry has flaws, huge flaws. Not the least of which is that he presided over the execution of one of his constituents, Cameron Todd Willingham, who was probably innocent. But I’m not sure that's a liability in today's Tea Party–obsessed GOP. There’s a legend in Lone Star politics that one of Perry’s Republican rivals in Texas tested the Willingham issue in a focus group. One Republican man, the story goes, squinted and said, “Well, I like that. Takes a lot of balls to execute an innocent man.” At that moment, folks say, Perry’s rival knew opposing him was fruitless.
However, besides the fact when we close our eyes and listen to him speak he sounds EXACTLY like the guy who fucked this country up in the first place, the thing that might REALLY derail Perry's run at the nomination is his much vaunted, yet completely overblown, ability to create jobs. Which is so important to his campaign that he even had it stenciled, Sarah Palin style, on his rather uninspiring bus.
Here let Paul Krugman explain it to you:
Still, does Texas job growth point the way to faster job growth in the nation as a whole? No.
What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states. I believe that the appropriate response to this insight is “Well, duh.” The point is that arguing from this experience that depressing wages and dismantling regulation in America as a whole would create more jobs — which is, whatever Mr. Perry may say, what Perrynomics amounts to in practice — involves a fallacy of composition: every state can’t lure jobs away from every other state.
In fact, at a national level lower wages would almost certainly lead to fewer jobs — because they would leave working Americans even less able to cope with the overhang of debt left behind by the housing bubble, an overhang that is at the heart of our economic problem.
So when Mr. Perry presents himself as the candidate who knows how to create jobs, don’t believe him. His prescriptions for job creation would work about as well in practice as his prayer-based attempt to end Texas’s crippling drought.
So much for that.
However will Rick Perry most likely overshadow Michele "Watch me eat a corndog" Bachmann?
Yes, he will.
Does he present a REAL challenge to the equally follicly resplendent Mitt Romney?
Yup.
Will he eventually win the GOP nomination?
Hell if I know!
That depends on just how much control the Teabagger-Borg now exerts over the Republican party.
If the rootin' tootin' Yosemite Sam faction of the party now has a death grip on the steering wheel, and is determined to "drive this bitch over a cliff," than Rick Perry is going to be standing on the debate stage next to President Obama, Thesaurus in hand, as he tries to figure out "what in the sam hill" the President just said that made him look like such a fucking imbecile.
However if the Grand Ole Party kicks the frat boys to the curb, and starts thinking with their wallets instead of their dicks, they will certainly choose Mitt Romney, who will actually be able to stand on the stage and sound reasonably competent.
I mean yeah he'll still lose, since the Evangelicals hate his Mormon Tabernacle ass and he puts audiences to sleep faster than warm milk spiked with Ambien, but at least he will not embarrass the entire party before he goes down for the count.
That said, I am still not taking my eyes off of Rick Perry for an instant. Just like Sarah Palin, I think he could be a very dangerous individual to have running lose across this nation, even if he does NOT get the nomination.
