Beating a dead horse...because it will feel so good when I stop.

I hate to keep picking at Rick Perry, especially when the republican field is such a target rich environment, but the guy is in full campaign mode and every time he opens his mouth he reminds me of when that naughty boy turns into a braying jackass in Pinocchio.  He is a fountain of stupid and I am starting to believe that, in the midst of the chance of a lifetime to run for president as a republican hero, he is going to end up so godsmacked, beleaguered and delirious that he ends up going home, pissing in his sock drawer and passing out. 

Not only did Jon Huntsman – in a strangely courageous move – call him out for his idiotic sounding climate change denial, (“Well there’s some folks got questions about that”), and half-hearted endorsement of teaching creationism over evolution, (“Well, there’s some folks say there’s some holes in that theory”), he is clearly flummoxed by having to try to explain that his Texas job-producing miracle is built on the backs of unskilled workers with no benefits and consists of the highest number of minimum wage jobs in the country.  He opposes the Obama health care laws while fully 26% of Texans have no health insurance, the highest percentage in the country.  Why?  Because employers there don’t provide it.   He was quoted today explaining his agenda for producing more jobs if he is elected by saying he’d “cut regulations and cut taxes to get people working again”, a weirdly  familiar and simpleminded  prescription that proved to be such a disaster during George II’s ignominious reign.

George’s unnecessary tax cut greatly amplified the deficit issues and combined with his dick-measuring war in Iraq is the reason that the Clinton surplus disappeared faster that a drunkard’s lottery winnings.  His laissez-faire “oversight” and lax regulation of everything from financial institutions to his pals in the oil patch ended with the country in a never ending nightmare of unemployment, fear, greed and general despair, the Gulf of Mexico permanently stained with a zillion gallons of crude, dead miners in West Virginia and people on the rooftops with rifles in New Orleans, just to mention the highlights of republican de-regulation. 

Now after the prolonged pissing contest that was the fight over raising the debt ceiling and all manner of clamorous hyperbole from republicans about any proposed tax increase being the black death for the economy, this donkey still insists on proposing corporate welfare tax cuts as the handful of magic beans we simply must have while the leaders of his party in congress are already spewing propaganda against Obama’s very modest proposal to extend the payroll tax cuts for the rest of this year and possibly next.  Why does a party that is so staunchly against any tax increase on the wealthy and closing loopholes for corporations oppose a tax cut that benefits moderate and low income people?  Not to encourage class warfare because truth be told, I’d very much like to be rich myself, but this is a scorched earth campaign to oppose Obama at every turn for no other reason than the ruling class doesn’t like him and wants him gone, period.

But I got a little off track there – we were talking about Rick ”I got big ideas” Perry, who looks like nothing so much as a man intent on emptying his trusty six-shooter into his foot even if he has to reload.   The frightening part of watching him blunder towards self destruction is that a certain percentage of the population is so scared and so uninformed that they are susceptible to a high bullshit-content Reaganesque narrative like this because it gives them hope when they don’t have any and makes them feel like maybe they can come out from under the bed and out into the light of a new day and make the car payments again.  Maybe that factory job that went away never to return will be replaced by something better, or least something good.  Maybe their kids can go to college and the rest of their life isn’t going to be a monotonous slog through hell after all. 

That this hypocritical pinhead fixer can have that effect on the very people that he and his clown posse have hurt the most is what makes me sick.  Ron Paul has some good ideas; Huntsman has some good ideas, and neither of them can win; at least that’s the conventional wisdom.   But  I am going to hang onto the notion that even if neither of them can win they are islands of sanity in the vast republican ocean of biblical delusions, proudly anti-science crusaders, thieves and gun nuts and that gives me hope.