"In Texas, it is fairly clear about where this state stands on that issue. As recently as a constitutional amendment that passed, I believe, with 76% of the vote. The people of the state of Texas, myself included, believe marriage is between one man and one woman."
Uh-huh. Let's see what else the intellectual titans of Texas believe.
51% believe that that evolution is a myth, with 38% saying that man was created in his present form by God 10,000 years ago.
58% of likely voters in Texas supported a bill -- now law -- that requires a woman to undergo a sonogram before being granted access to an abortion.
Republicans control every single statewide elected office in Texas, with a 19-12 majority in the state senate, 95-55 majority in the state house along with both of the U.S. Senate seats and 36 of the U.S. House seats.
With that information as a guide to give you an idea how dominant conservative politics are in Texas:
Chances are by now you've all seen this, which is so desperate, idiotic and not-at-all-surprising that I didn't even bother posting or commenting on it.
Well, the above video is a pretty brilliant response to it.
For a couple of weeks now on the podcast, Bob and I have discussed the fact that while everyone's busy pointing out Rick Perry's inability to speak without tripping over his own stupid tongue, no one's paying attention to how asinine and dangerous the things he's trying to say are. Like a couple of weeks ago, when he couldn't remember that he wanted to shutter the Department of Energy, which controls the country's nuclear weapons -- or this gem from Saturday, where he seems to be saying that he wants to end civilian control of our military:
"There is a time and a place for us to intervene, and intervene militarily. But when we intervene militarily, we best make the decision on how we are going to win and how we are going to win convincingly and quickly, send those young men and women with the equipment to win. Don’t let some congressman sitting in an air-conditioned office in Washington DC deciding what the rules of engagement are. … And for us to micromanage them, in a civilian way, without their commanders truly in charge, is absolutely irresponsible and as commander-in-chief of this country I will not let it happen."
I bring this up not because it's so outrageous, which it of course is, and not solely because it's indicative of how far a candidate like Perry has to go to get noticed at an event like the Christian Family Leader "values forum" when he's way down in the polls. No, I mention it because it's crap like this that makes it 100% clear how offensive it is when self-righteous clowns like Glenn Greenwald, Jane Hamsher, etc. make the claim that the Obama Administration is essentially the same thing as any given Republican presidency would be these days, and when they threaten, as Greenwald has, that allowing one of these Perry-esque far-right malignancies into the White House would be a necessary sacrifice if it meant that it would finally bring the country around to how destructive the current GOP model of thinking is.
Right. Because Obama, although by no means someone willing to give the left everything it wants, is the same as a guy who wants to take the reins completely off the U.S. military, who wants to kill the Department of Energy, who thinks the Occupy Wall Street protesters are dirty hippies who are just looking for a handout and who need to go take a shower and get a job (as Gingrich so cleverly intoned on Saturday), who thinks God told him or her to run for office (as half the GOP hopefuls have enthused), who thinks homosexuality is some kind of social disease (Bachmann and Santorum), and who believes that individual towns should be able to ban mosques if they choose (Herman "Toucan Stubs" Cain).
These people are fucking crazy and dangerous. And refusing to accept that because you're all in a huff that the current president simply isn't liberal enough for you is just as crazy and just as dangerous.
"'If you’re looking for a slick politician or a guy with great teleprompter skills,' Perry says, 'we already have that — and he’s destroying our economy. I’m a doer, not a talker.' He’s a doer! He does things! Things that don’t involve communicating effectively! Things like taking pain medication, possibly! And he won’t read off a teleprompter, because he may not be able to read!"
-- Alex Pareene in Salon, on Rick Perry's ridiculous new ad in which he chuckles along with his own inability to avoid regularly tripping over his own tongue, makes fun of Barack Obama for reading off of a teleprompter, and does both while reading off of a teleprompter
Chances are by now you've seen the latest video clip in the ongoing contest between the GOP presidential candidates to see which one can out-crazy all the rest. Just when you thought Herman Cain had pretty much locked up the game with last week's audaciously hallucinatory Cigarette Smoking Man ad, along comes Rick Perry to slam the table with a satisfied, "Domino, motherfucker!" His 25-minute speech at a Cornerstone event in New Hampshire this past Friday -- the YouTubed proof of which has now gone viral -- is so indescribably surreal that it's difficult to imagine not only how it can be topped but the level to which it immediately takes the entire Republican race for the White House. To keep in mind as you watch it that this guy is the governor of Texas, the former frontrunner and a Time magazine cover boy and someone who is still by some considered a possible nominee is to admit that conservative politics have truly achieved a kind of blissful lunatic Nirvana and will likely never come back to the serious realm of planet Earth again.
But while the obvious reaction to the video clip -- the first place most people's minds have gone, judging by the various things being written and said about it -- is disbelief, followed quickly by the conclusion that Perry has to be drunk or high or otherwise intoxicated, my thoughts immediately went somewhere else.
I'll probably catch a certain amount of crap for this for a couple of different reasons, but I was maybe about ten minutes into the clip before I think I actually said out loud to my computer screen, "Wow, I guess those rumors were true -- this guy is flaming."
Now, no, despite the word of a couple of prominent political consultants I'm close to who really do maintain that Perry's sexuality is one of the worst-kept secrets in politics and the aforementioned rumors dating back years -- many involving an alleged affair Perry had with his former secretary of state in Texas, a man named Geoff Connor -- I tend to dismiss all accusations that can't be easily backed up with facts. I have no idea whether Rick Perry is gay and while almost anything is within the realm of possibility, I'm not a fan of perpetuating conspiracist ramblings, so I'm not in any way claiming that I have it on infallible authority that Perry is lying his ass off about his sexual orientation. What I'm saying is that while the New Hampshire clip is disconcertingly weird for a whole host of reasons that kind of gnaw at the inside of your skull, one of the most pronounced is how Perry's gun-toting, shit-kicking tough guy suddenly seems to have been replaced by somebody apparently in possession of a whole arsenal of affected effeminate mannerisms. I mean, Jack Twist didn't even act that queenie -- he certainly never cuddled with a bottle of maple syrup -- and he really was supposed to be a gay cowboy.
The irony, of course, is that it's hard to get too worked up about the mere mention of, oh, I don't know, let's call it "gayerism" -- like birtherism, only more colorful and with better music -- because Perry himself had no trouble once again dredging up the question of President Obama's birth certificate recently, another topic which has almost always been the realm of the conspiracy minded. It's also worth noting, as a disclaimer, that I'm not claiming that every gay man is swishing and flamboyant, only that Perry struck me as being exactly that the other day -- and it flies in the face of the image he usually presents to his constituency and the country. He looked, to me at least, like a guy who'd just come out of the closet and was talking and acting like the "real him" for the first time in his life (and for the record, I actually thought he came off as unusually likable during the New Hampshire speech).
But look, again, I don't have a lick of proof on this -- though I'm definitely curious to know if I'm the only one who watched the Perry video and thought, as Bryan Safi would say, "That's gay."
*Again I'm not saying Rick Perry is actually gay. It's a movie reference -- one of several in this post, now that I think about it.
"But this is America, remember, where one should never underestimate shallow. And Rick Perry brings shallow to a new level. He is very gifted in that regard. He could be the Adolf Hitler of shallow.
Perry's campaign is still struggling to recover from the kind of spectacular, submarine-at-crush-depth collapse seldom seen before in the history of presidential politics. The governor went from presumptive front-runner to stammering talk-show punch line seemingly in the speed of a single tweet, rightly blasted for being too incompetent even to hold his own in televised debates with a half-bright pizza salesman like Herman Cain and a goggle-eyed megachurch Joan of Arc like Michele Bachmann. But such superficial criticisms of his weirdly erratic campaign demeanor don't even begin to get at the root of why we should all be terrified of Perry and what he represents. After all, you have to go pretty far to stand out as a whore and a sellout when you come from a state that has produced such luminaries in the history of political corruption as LBJ, Karl Rove and George W. Bush. But Rick Perry has managed to set a scary new low in the annals of opportunism, turning Texas into a swamp of political incest and backroom dealing on a scale not often seen this side of the Congo or Sierra Leone.
In an era when there's exponentially more money in politics than we've ever seen before, Perry is the candidate who is exponentially more willing than we've ever seen before to whore himself out for that money. On the human level he is a nonpersonality, an almost perfect cipher – a man whose only discernible passion is his extreme willingness to be whatever someone will pay him to be, or vote for him to be. Even scarier, the religious community around which he has chosen to pull his human chameleon act features some of the most extreme end-is-nigh nutcases in America, the last people you want influencing the man with the nuclear football. Perry is a human price tag – 'Being There' meets 'Left Behind.' And sometimes there's nothing more dangerous than nothing at all."
I think Taibbi may be the only guy in the world who can mention Hitler in an argument without technically violating Godwin's Law -- and the only guy who can actually outdo a Hitler reference by bringing up Hannibal Lecter in the same piece.
Hey, kids -- guess what non-story isn't dead and buried yet?
Let's go to an interview with Rick Perry, published in Parade online today:
"But you've seen (Barack Obama's birth certificate).
'I don't know. Have I?'
You don't believe what's been released?
'I don't know. I had dinner with Donald Trump the other night.'
And?
'That came up."
I swear, you want a clever Halloween costume? Dress as Obama's birth certificate. When people ask you what exactly you are -- tell them you're a zombie. It works on a bunch of different levels.
As I said last week, Rick Perry is a) ambitious, and b) dumb as a bag of cat litter, so dredging this up yet again as a bone to the lowest common denominator among the GOP base -- which is itself the lowest common denominator among American society these days -- is thoroughly predictable. But this should again leave no doubt as to who the lone adult in the room is when you put President Obama up against any of the first ones out of the Republican presidential candidate clown car right now.
My favorite part of that excerpt, by the way, is when the interviewer asks, "And?" You can almost hear her biting her tongue to keep from saying, "And? And?! And what, you shit-kicking moron? What wisdom did perennial con man and pathological fabulist Donald Fucking Trump impart on you? How was dinner? Were you so smitten by him that Texas stars danced over your head and you blew him in a car on the ride home? Bet you two really solved the world's problems during that little uptown summit." Well, at least that's what I like to imagine she was thinking.
"My home state of Texas and Israel share the experience of ‘civilized men and women thrown into new and harsh conditions, beset by enemies.'"
-- Rick Perry on President Obama's support of Palestinian statehood in the Jerusalem Post
Perry's quote cribs a line from historian T.R. Fehrenbach, but since Perry's neither scrupulous nor particularly bright it goes without saying that the reference was taken completely out of context.
Max Blumenthal digs up the original quote, which deals with Texas's systematic extermination of the Comanche Indians:
"The Texan’s attitudes, his inherent chauvinism and the seeds of his belligerence, sprouted from his conscious effort to take and hold his land. It was the reaction of essentially civilized men and women thrown into new and harsh conditions, beset by enemies they despised. The closest 20th-century counterpart is the State of Israel, born in blood in another primordial land."
I'm kind of thinking that would make a great bumper sticker: "Chauvanism. Belligerence. Texas."
By the way, correct me if I'm wrong but isn't attacking the President of the United States in a foreign publication the equivalent of treason? Don't I remember hearing Republicans drumbeat that kind of thing to death from 2001 to 2008? Oh forget it. Why bother.
From a Funny or Die slideshow imagining what it would be like if Rick Perry were behind the Siri feature on the new iPhone and could answer any question you asked
I'll try to make this quick, since as I said I'm kind of pressed for time right now.
Chances are by now you're aware of the fallout from last week's Values Voters Summit, the annual event in which the hard-right Evangelical nutjob segment of the electorate gathers to throw King James Bibles at the feet of Republican leaders to see who will be the last one standing after beating his or her competition to death with one. This year, everybody seemed to be gunning for one guy: Mitt Romney. Poor Mitt got it hard from both ends, so to speak, as his place on the speaking roster happened -- through what I'm sure was complete coincidence -- to fall between Dallas megachurch demagogue Pastor Robert Jeffress and psychopathic talk radio host Bryan Fischer, both of whom have railed against Romney's Mormon faith as an insult to the one, true God.
Jeffress, who astonishingly is the cuddlier of the two, merely referred to Mormonism as a cult while lavishing praise on Rick Perry for supposedly being a trustworthy follower of Jesus Christ; Fischer took it three or four giant steps further, saying not only that a proven Christian and a proven Christian alone should be our next president, but that Sharia law is coming to take over our courts, homosexuals are a threat to the public health and the reason we haven't seen a successful attack on the contiguous 48 since 9/11 is that crowds sing "God Bless America" during the seventh inning stretch at major league baseball games. And no, I'm not making that last one up.
Romney, to his credit, tried to take the high road in his reaction to all the hyper-pious pummeling. Of course at something like the Values Voters Summit, the high road doesn't need to be very high; the Lincoln Tunnel towers over the discourse at this thing.
So is Mormonism a cult? Was it, for the most part, the brainchild of con-men and has it been perpetuated by the power-hungry and adhered to by the weak and desperate? Is it a lunatic belief system that should have no place influencing American politics? Yes on all counts. But here's the thing: That makes it no different than any other faith-based religion.
Fischer and Jeffress have always been despicably hateful fuckers whose opinions needed to be pushed so far to the fringes that they practically vanish into the ether. But at this point more than any other in our recent history, this country does not have the luxury to concern itself with with ridiculous contrivances like which ancient superstition a candidate aligns him or herself with -- whether he or she passes some religious purity test by properly genuflecting before the right god.
Over the next few months, as the campaign ramps up, you're going to start hearing a lot more proclamations of faith from those running for the highest office in the world. They'll talk about how their belief in Jesus or whatever-the-hell guides them, and what's more, they'll do it largely as a theatrical act of indulgence, as a means of cynically pandering to those they feel they need to pander to in order to get elected. Their command performance may not always be at the whim of blatant sociopaths like Jeffress and Fischer, but it will certainly be as a show of respect to the supposedly benign faith of which these men have become extremist purveyors and arbiters. And that faith, while something I disagree with wholeheartedly as a rational human being, should at the very least be a personal choice and a personal choice only -- it should be something that at all times is excluded from American politics.
At this fragile point in our nation's history, the fact that our presidential candidates will feel that they have the latitude, even for a moment, to gush metaphysical politics-as-usual platitudes is simply terrifying. Discussing something as abstract and ineffectual as faith at this moment is akin to extolling one's own favorite lottery numbers. Neither offers a concrete method of action. Faith will never defend this country's people from the ongoing threats to their livelihood. God won't save us from the mess we're currently in.
We need something more than wishful thinking, and we don't have the time to talk about anything less.
Above it's Chris Matthews taking apart an unbearably smug Pastor Robert Jeffress on Hardball last night.
"Rick Perry is not a racist... he is a good man. (There's) an intimidation factor, you'd better believe it. You know, if you're a Southern white guy this is part of your life."
-- Lindsey Graham on Rick Perry and the hardships of being a white man in the South
Yeah, right. Unless you're Ned Beatty in Deliverance what threats do you really face as a Southern white guy? It's not like you have any natural predators, except for maybe gravity if you happen to be a member of Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Actually, now that I think about it, I do know something that intimidates a Southern white guy: eighth grade.
"It's just a name... Like those are vertical blinds. It's just what it was called."
-- Judge David Davis of Haskell County, Texas explaining why giving a hunting camp the name "Niggerhead" isn't a big deal
I swear, there's nothing that's simultaneously more hilarious and depressing than watching an ignorant redneck justify and defend his blatant racism (typically followed, by the way, by an expression of indignation that you'd dare call him a racist and an accusation that you're the racist for picking on white people) but this reaches a whole new level of stupid.
I'll help bankroll the first guy to make a t-shirt that reads: "Nigger Is the New Vertical Blinds."
"Their ability to shape their own reality — to blame the president for the entire recession while simultaneously rigging the game against the recovery is unprecedented in American political history. It’s evidence that the modern Republican Party has ceased to be driven by policy and ideas, and, instead, has become nothing more than a marketing and advertising firm selling candidates like packs of cigarettes. You’ll look cool and it’ll feel so good. They fish you in, get you hooked and you wind up voting against your own best interests while lamenting, 'Why-oh-why does the nation have cancer? Must be the black guy.' It’s infomercial fiction pitched and sold using Fox News propaganda, AM talk radio fury, cinematic production values, easy-to-remember Frank Luntz zingers and all varieties of star-spangled cheerleading. They’ve been able to so effectively whitewash their guilt in this economic mess that the current Republican frontrunner is a top-down J.J. Abrams reboot of George W. Bush who actually was president when the economy collapsed."
My podcast co-host's stuff has been exceptional lately, but seriously -- his take-down of the new Rick Perry: A Michael Bay Film trailer is a thing of beauty.
You're probably going to hear quite a few iterations of the word "ghoulish" tossed around today. That's pretty much the best way to describe the response by Tea Party sociopaths in Tampa last night to the idea of letting someone die if he or she doesn't have insurance and can't afford to pay medical bills.
Chances are by now you've seen what I'm talking about, but in case you haven't yet, here it is: a hypothetical question posed by Wolf Blitzer, moderator of CNN's Tea Party debate among the GOP candidates for president, to crazy old man Ron Paul. Listen for the audience reaction; that's the gold.
Now it's worth pointing out that Blitzer -- who proved throughout the debate why you shouldn't listen to him while driving or operating heavy machinery -- predictably telegraphed his punch by making the hypothetical patient in question a guy who chose not to pay for health insurance rather than, you know, one of the millions across the country who can't afford insurance. Regardless, this is the second time in as many weeks that we've seen a crowd full of presumably fiercely pro-life Republicans unable to contain their orgiastic bloodlust at the idea of killing somebody. You'll remember that the audience at the Reagan library last week -- Simi Valley suburbanites, all of them -- just about had the largest non-gangbang porn-related mass climax in history when Texas shit-kicker action figure Rick Perry bragged about executing 234 people, at least one of whom was very likely innocent.
Here's the important thing to keep in mind, though -- the basic message of the Tea Party jackasses like the ones that grow up out of the ground in a place like Tampa: They get to decide who lives and who dies. Who's worthy to live or die.
Are you a fetus, even one that's the product of rape or incest, or who's almost doomed from the start to be unloved and to eventually choke the state system -- child protection or penal -- that many on the right believes is the only legitimate recourse? Congratulations, you live -- no matter what. Are you somebody who, ironically, committed a vicious crime as an adult or who was at least convicted of doing so, or maybe even just some poor idiot who made a really bad decision about his or her life and who now stands to pay for that mistake with that very life? Sorry, fuck you, parasite -- you die.
That's really what it comes down to: The sickening Randian "producers vs. parasites" horseshit ethos that can be distilled down to a battle-cry-ready slogan with almost no effort, one that fits really nicely on a bumper-sticker. The problem, of course, is -- who decides who's a producer and who's a parasite? I'm terrified of leaving a decision like that to people who diabolically cheer death like Romans at the Coliseum.
My favorite part of last night's monster truck rally in Tampa, though? That Wolf Blitzer actually lauded the whole thing as evidence of a substantive debate on the issues. Unless CNN actually set out to give the Tea Party and its vile philosophy enough rope to hang themselves on national television, what we witnessed was nothing more than the continued elevation of a relatively small, shockingly ignorant group of pretend freedom fighters simply because they make for good TV. They're splashed across your screen, over and over again, precisely because they're guaranteed to do ridiculous shit like shout for the deaths of those who disagree with their view of the world.
In the end, the Tea Party and its ilk amount to nothing more than the ultimate reality TV show.
Jon Stewart positively nails the point that Cesca and I have been discussing on the podcast for a couple of weeks now: swaggering, shit-kicking pretend tough-guy action figure Rick Perry is almost certain to win the Republican nomination -- precisely because he's a swaggering, shit-kicking pretend tough-guy action figure.
Plus Stewart manages a nice parting shot at the clownish buffoonery of Al Sharpton, just as a little bonus.
By the way, if you're interested, a second clip from last night's Daily Show is posted over at HuffPo -- this one has Stewart subtly mocking NBC/Telemundo's Jose Diaz-Balart. Or as I like to call him, the Least Interesting Man in the World.
