Rick Perry: Rightwing Idiot Extraordinaire

Rick Perry is filling the legacy of his predecessor George Walker Bush quite nicely, thank you very much. Recent republican elected officials are becoming quite famous for putting their foot in their mouth and then hopping around on one foot for a few weeks at a time. The latest example of this idiocy came at one of the Teabagger protests that came to pass on Tax Day last week.

Perry stood before the meager gathering and started his rant about how much he hated Washington. Now mind you, he hasn’t taken up this cause lightly or with insufficient reasoning. He is mad at Washington because there is a Democrat in the White House who isn’t trying to bankrupt the country by emptying out the Treasury by giving tax cuts to Rick Perry’s millionare friends and that pisses him off to no end. Rick Perry hates the fact that the money that comes to Texas from the recently passed stimulus plan has strings attached that are designed to help people in these tough times, not chuck them out in the street like Texas usually does. Rick Perry hates being told what to do, just like the Chimp that preceded him in the governor’s mansion. He made his dissatisfaction all too clear when he spoke to the assembled crowd.

In what he hoped was a veiled threat (but which turned out to be the material that made him out to be nothing more than a bigoted idiot and a national laughingstock) Rick Perry made a passing reference to Texas leaving the Union. Seceding. This is where the No Child Left Behind Act shows its flaws because there was a time that every school child knew that states cannot leave the Union once they join. We fought a hellacious war over that principle and the people who thought it was OK to leave lost that conflict. Nevertheless, the concept lives on in the demented minds of those few total idiots who don’t like the direction of the nation but do not have the political capital to push the idea past the talking stages.

Now Rick Perry did not advocate seceding immediately. He even praised the idea of Texas staying in the Union. So, I’m wondering, if he wasn’t looking at it down the road, why did he bring it up at all? Well, Perry is in the political fight of his life and what do rightwingers do when they have their backs against the wall? They return to their base and in this case it is the far rightwing fringe of voters who cling to the States’ Rights doctrine. You know these people, don’t you? This is the crowd that forgets that the Civil War decided once and for all that a state cannot secede and it does not have authority or preeminence  over the federal government. The state does have some rights but telling the feds what to do and when to do it isn’t one of them.

These States Rights people are also the same folks that used that excuse as their main reason to maintain the slave society of the South. They used it again after the war to keep black folks “in their places”  and keep the feds at bay. Reagan used it to signal the Kloset Klansmen that he was one of them and not a Hollywood actor when he ran for president. Rick Perry is signaling the bigoted base of the republican party (that no one likes to be reminded of but whom without they cannot win elections in the South) that he is one of them. He may have told the Teabagger crowd that he was just a good old boy looking out for Texas against the forces that would make Texas change how they do things but to the rest of us he’s signaling his intent to keep playing the politics of race and division and he’ll use States’ Rights to do that.

And all along I thought George Bush was our state’s biggest asshole.

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Posted in Politics
Tags: history lesson, Rick Perry, secession, texas racists