“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.” Abraham Lincoln

This quote ran through my mind today as I read story after story of how Rick “Talkin’ bout the Benjamins” Perry ran a combination corporate welfare agency and whore house out of the Texas state capitol.  After being elected by reportedly wandering the state speaking in tongues and flaunting a deeply cynical and hypocritical religiosity, he immediately set to work selling influence and access to whoever brought the biggest bag of cash in a flurry of abject corruption that would make Spiro Agnew and Ed Meese proud. Oil and gas leases  and the anti-environmental policies that enable them, the cockamamie Trans Texas Corridor toll road construction bids, phony “development” slush funds – they all received governmental hand outs and returned the favor with contributions in the millions of dollars – over 100 million dollars since the 2000 election.

How does a “wipe-snot-on-your-sleeve” good old boy Texas republican get away with that kind of cheesy and transparent patronage and still get elected?  Well from here it looks like he does it by wearing old testament street cred on that same sleeve; jabbering on about abortion and gay marriage and overseeing the execution of death row inmates at four times the pace of any other state in the union.  

He recently went on record giving total support for Israel, probably because the damn Ayrabs look a lot like Mexicans, and because of his wrath-of-god inclination towards biblical apocalypse – something which current Israeli policy seems destined to produce.  His modern take on the wild west notion of manifest destiny and “kill all the Indians” leads to a perversion of American exceptionalism – a road we recently traveled with his dumb ass predecessor as governor, and which he seems to want to revisit by getting his foreign policy updates from Donald “It will only take a week” Rumsfeld and a group of his minions, one of whom is Doug Feith.  This is a man once described as “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth” by Gen. Tommy Frank, for getting completely sucked in by Ahmed Chalabi and his relentless and incomprehensible advocacy for the invasion of Iraq. 

I would have thought that the most prominent example of a modern theocracy – our friendly mullahs in Iran – would put people off the whole idea of a half mad religious sect reading 2,000 year old books and deciding how we all should live.  Memo to Rick, Sarah, Michele, and the rest of you – conquering Arab lands and building a 40,000 seat combination church and Wal-Mart in East Jerusalem is not god’s plan.  An endless war against the Muslim world is also not god’s plan and America is probably not going to re-conquer Europe either. 

Why is it that the politicians most likely to kill something given half a chance are so hung up on the old testament?  It’s like they never read past Leviticus to the part where they talk about loving one another – it’s all a pillar of salt and an eye for an eye.  Oh, and they all do seem unnaturally hung up on the men not laying down together part too.  How can Perry cavort with Cadillac evangelists, neo-nazi preachers and all manner of fringe fanatics and freaks and be taken seriously?  It’s because it’s all an act designed to keep that part about meeting with corporate bag men and cutting deals with dedicated anti-environmental interests on the down low, camouflaged by this aura of righteous, patriotic, pseudo-Reagan, “morning-in-America” bullshit, all the while he’s giving a sleeve job to anyone with enough cash to keep him in ostrich-skin boots, gold nugget cuff links and a colt revolver. 

Now this clown – who insists he’s running because his wife told him it was his god given duty to save his country from that terrible negro, Obama – works a room shaking hands, quoting scripture and trying to sound like he knows what continent Afghanistan is part of, hoping that nobody jerks back the curtain far enough for the public to catch him sitting on the lap of the big money republican elite that got spoiled running the country for eight years and has been pissed off since 2008. I like to think he’s going to wet himself sitting there and they’re going to send him away with his pants around his ankles muttering the 23^rd psalm.