Texas Governor Rick Perry
Despicable Scum of the Week is a weekly look at a despicable scum. This week…
”Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention.” — Molly Ivins
An immeasurable part of this week’s column is due to the reporting of Right Wing Watch, the premier website for documenting the batshit lunacy of the Religious Right. If I had to delve into the santorum being spewed by these nutjobs without RRW’s reporting, my brain would be seeping out of my ears. If you think the political Right is crazy, follow the exploits of the Evangelistas through RRW for a daily dose of rhetoric so vile it will make you want to pull your own liver out.
Just what we need: another moronic, ultra-conservative, corrupt, militaristic, evangelistic, misanthropic, homophobic, devious bastard president from fucking Texas. Andy Borowitz suggests a campaign slogan for Rick Perry: “What Harm Could a Governor from Texas Do?” The reason the George Shrub and Rick Perry camps don’t get along is that the two are so eerily alike. Perry is what Bush would be if Bush had gone to Texas A&M instead of Yale. All he needs to do now is announce Dick Cheney as his running mate. Now that he’s drinking from the cesspool of the campaign he is a presumed frontrunner, as he is the only candidate with hair that rivals that of the Romneytron 3000. With the hair, the ill-fitting suits, his permanent smirk and the endless stream of bible-based bullshit he spews, Perry comes off as a crooked Sunday morning televangelist. After watching him for five minutes or more you feel a gnawing urge to tell him his puppy has died, just to get that damned smile off his face.
Perry not only has great hair, he has enormous balls as well. He staged a photo-op at an evangelical Christian school where as governor he signed bills restricting abortion services and prohibiting Gay marriage. In 2010 he held a fundraiser at Altira, the corporate headquarters of Phillip Morris tobacco. In signing a law requiring ID to vote, Rick said, “This is what democracy really is all about.” Perry touts his state’s balanced budget but fails to mention that he balanced it using the same federal stimulus dollars he so vociferously denounces. Thanks to very generous donations to Rick from various corporations and individuals, Perry has showered Texas with nuclear waste and chicken shit. Billionaire Harold Simmons has given over a million dollars to Rick over the past decade, which had nothing at all to do with the nuclear waste processing plant that Simmons is now building in the state. Similarly, a $150,000 donation given by a Mississippi poultry company to Perry wasn’t in the least bit associated with the $500,000 state grant given to the donor to build a chicken processing plant near Waco. (Los Angeles Times) But what else should you expect when you elect Mr. Haney as your governor?
Little more than a quick glance at Perry’s record quickly dispels his messianic mantra of being the “Texas Miracle Man.” Texas ranks 40th out of 50 states in quality of healthcare; 50th in number of residents with health insurance; last in a woman’s ability to obtain prenatal care; and dead last in children’s access to medical care. (Irregular Times) He has stripped $10 billion in state children’s services over the next two years. Texas is reeling from a cut of $4.8 billion in public education which the New York Times called, “the largest cuts in public education since World War II,” and that’s on top of additional cuts of $3.5 billion a year to public education in Texas also over the next 2 years. By some amazing coincidence, less than 2% of teachers in the state are unionized. Texas is tied with Mississippi as states with the highest percentage of jobs paying minimum wage or less. Jim Hightower points out that “Perry presides over a state that has more people in poverty and more without health coverage than any other.” Even the Reason Foundation, the Koch-backed septic tank of Libertarian mouthpieces, slammed Perry for his budgetary hypocrisy.
In a Washington Post column, pompous asshole and Conservatism’s best fiction writer, George Will, makes the strange assertion that “Supposed examples of Perry’s extremism evaporate in sunlight,” then in the next paragraph states that if Perry becomes a candidate he “will do so by his visceral appeal to social Conservatives.” Gee, maybe you’re right, Poindexter. Earlier this week Perry called on the president to issue a moratorium on ALL regulations. All of them. That’s certainly not extreme. In his “book,” Fed Up!, Rick calls climate science, “one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight.” Nope, nothing extreme there. There’s certainly nothing extreme about the gibbering yaboos Perry surrounded himself with for his Prayerapalooza, or in his proclaiming the month of April to be “Abortion Recovery Month,” or vetoing a ban on texting while driving as being the equivalent of “a government effort to micromanage the behavior of adults.” Nice try, George.
I could go on…and on…and on about Rick Perry but frankly, the hazard of taking a week off from writing this column is that Rick announced his candidacy during my break and now practically the whole world has written about this evil sum’bitch. I’ll just leave the last word to Jim Hightower, who sums up Perry perfectly thus, “Think Michele Bachmann but with better hair.”
QUOTES
Let’s hope President Obama extrapolates this sage advice from Perry’s speech to the Republican Leadership Conference: “Our loudest opponents on the Left are never going to like us so let’s quit trying to curry favor with them.”
On Rick’s former buddy, Al Gore: “I’ve heard Al Gore talk about man-made global warming so much that I’m starting to think that his mouth is the leading source of all that supposedly deadly carbon dioxide.” AND “I certainly got religion, I think he’s gone to Hell.” (Politico)
Perry on the BP Gulf oil disaster: “From time to time there are going to be things that occur that are acts of God that cannot be prevented.” (Politico)
God bless America! “We are the most exceptional nation on the face of the earth.” (Quoted in the Nation Blog)
“Now, therefore, I, Rick Perry, Governor of Texas…do hereby proclaim the three-day period [from Friday to Sunday] as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.” (Official state proclamation)
Perry on everything: “I think it’s time for us to just hand it over to God and say, ‘God, you’re going to have to fix this.’” (New York Times Blog)
Perry demonstrates his awareness: “Not one time that I’m aware of has hydraulic fracking impacted groundwater.” (Think Progress)
“God bless Rush Limbaugh!” (YouTube video)
“My children, who are in their 20s, know that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.” (Fox ‘News’ Sunday as quoted by Political Correction)
“I have no idea what God’s plans are for me but I’m gonna try to be as faithful to him as I can be. I know I will fail as I have often but the good news is we have a forgiving God and I try to follow His directions. I read my Bible faithfully and every morning try to get up and take that devotional to heart and I don’t know what God’s got planned for me. I pray for God’s guidance. I don’t know how anyone who sits in that governor’s desk right behind you…how they function without that divine guidance in people’s lives and the values that the Bible teaches us. I tell people, I say, that sometimes get their nose out of joint about me being a believer I ask them, “well which one of the ten commandments that’s out there on the lawn of the Texas capitol bothers you so much? I mean which one of those is bad public policy? Which one of those is so onerous to how we as a people function?” (CBN interview)
On excluding Gay scouts and scoutmasters from the Boy Scouts: “[Boy] Scouts needs to be about teaching those traditional values. It doesn’t need to be about teaching sexuality.” (Hannity and Colmes)
GO FURTHER
The Texas Observer on Perry and that wacky band of Christian misfits, the New Apostolic Reformation.
Rick’s extensive PolitiFact file.
Clare O’Connor in Forbes calls Rick a “submissive whore to billionaire corporate pimps.” (Okay, she doesn’t actually call him that but she does lay out a list of 24 billionaire donors to Perry’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign.)
Perry’s complete speech at this year’s Republican Leadership Conference.
Mother Jones’ list of “Rick Perry’s Top Controversies” could easily be doubled.
Think Progress’ “Top 10 Things Rick Perry Doesn’t Want You to Know About Him” could easily be tripled.
Rather than trying to anally probe the depths of evangelical mold spores behind Perry’s Response Rally, I’ll let Right Wing Watch do it for me.
Jim Hightower welcomes “Governor SuperCuts” into the cesspool of the Republican presidential campaign
Perry’s complete presidential campaign announcement. Have fun.
Rick’s speech at the Response Rally. I don’t blame you if you don’t watch this one…
Bob Moser’s wonderful review of Perry’s “book” in the Texas Observer
