The inexplicable march of the Texas blowhards continues in earnest now that Rick “Stop printing the damn money” Perry is hitting his stride after a week of campaigning, and the unsettling comparisons to George Bush are becoming hard to avoid. Like Bush, Rick has fallen ass-backwards into a successful Texas economy built on abundant oil and gas resources at a time the price of oil has gone from 20 bucks a barrell to well over a hundred, combined with the highest percentage of minimum wage workers in the nation – wait; that's not true - they’re tied for last, with Mississippi.
Like George, he has remained blissfully free of the ravages of the road kill housing market due to Texas having the most stringent consumer protection laws in the country related to housing. This, for anyone who isn’t paying attention, is the government intervening successfully in the market place, an idea that would make most card carrying right wing ideologues retch. Unlike George, however, he has the anti-immigrant racists of the tea party fueling his rise to national notoriety and thus will have some ‘splainin’ to do about the part played by Mexican manufacturing plants, workers and imported parts in the ongoing Texas employment miracle.
That will put him at odds with his most fervent supporters on several fronts, and put questions about his ideological purity front and center at the very time that Michele Bachman is working her mystical wide-eyed voodoo on salivating ministers from one corner of South Carolina to the other. Combine that with the very prominent role of the stimulus funds in amping up job growth in education, health care and government and the tea party pin up boy starts to look more and more like he’s all hat and no cattle.
Rick may also find himself having to explain his ties - though lobbyists his administration hired – to current federal prison hors d’oeuvre Tom Delay and one time republican big shot, Jack Abramhof; professional partisan money grabbers and bag men who made a career out of bringing home the bacon and spreading the lard on Texas toast, setting the stage for Rick’s self-described economic wizardry.
These problems aside, Rick and Stepford simpleton Bachman may have a larger and more fundamental problem in trying to drag all of the tea party baggage along with them on the campaign trail. There’s no truth to the rumor that Bachman has hired Imelda Marcos’ former cabana boy to travel on the “Which Way’s Heaven?” campaign bus to manage her share and Perry was overheard telling his campaign aides to see if they could go down to the local Home Depot and pick up some Mexicans to sit in the back and be available to help him drag his around. They may want to re-think this in light of the NY Times poll done recently that suggests that the tea party – for all of its success in creating a clattering rabble and scaring the shit out of the other candidates – is deeply out of favor with most Americans and ranks right down alongside fundamentalist Christians in a ranking of who should be influencing policy and choosing the political and economic direction of the country. In fact, most Americans would rather have Howie Mandel and Carrot Top running things than anyone so closely identified with the tea party.
As their 15 minutes ticks closer and closer to the end leaders of the tea party movement are having their protective layers of “government out of our lives” and “get rid of all the bums” rhetoric peeled away and what’s revealed is a vile and hateful core smoldering with the toxic fumes of racism and old testament philosophy – having less to do with shrinking government and cutting spending than it does with outlawing abortion and driving imaginary waves of half-crazed and savage immigrants into the sea. The few tea party inspired republicans that make any sense are almost lost in the incendiary and incoherent mob-mentality and cowed by the fact that any whiff of compromise has become a capitulation and renders them dangerous turncoats and subject to stoning or burning at the political stake. Or, like Tim Pawlenty, utterly frustrated irrelevance. Like King Kong escaped from his captors, it is running amok and sensible people across the country are running away screaming in every direction. Now tea party heroines like Michele “Tip of the Spear” Bachman will end up with her head on a pike carried through the town square if she waivers from genuflecting to the new and poorly conceived orthodoxy that turns the simplest political decision into a knife fight.
So Bachman and Perry can continue to flaunt their prayerfulness and undeserved state of grace for the halfwits who come out to their combination stump speech/ prayer rally/BBQ's and the cameras and blathering pundits will surely follow them and breathlessly report every word. Somewhere Mitt “Corporations are people too” Romney is practicing not responding to hecklers by saying something stupid while knocking back a stiff bloody mary and saying his own prayer of thanks that these two morons have the spotlights directed on them. He couldn’t have planned it any better…
No comments:
Post a Comment