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| Hi, I’m Rick! We met on line. Wanna vote for me for president? |
Stipulated: A Texas countryclub-cowboy governor and former A&M “yeller” (read “male cheerleader” or “college jackass”) who graduated with a 1.95 GPA in “animal science” is likely to talk like a drawling imbecile a lot of the time.
But Rick Perry has come out of the campaign gate spewing a degree of redneckofascist idiocy unheard of since…well, since the last time a former cheerleader-turned-Texas-governor ran for president. Indeed, Rick Perry—being a nat’ral born Texan unlike cowboy from Kennebunkport GW Bush—lacks the exposure to the academic environment of Phillips Academy and Yale that allowed Bush’s sense-memory of what intelligent discourse sounds like to keep him from swaggering off too far into the prairie-grass wilderness of redneck punkspeak that Perry instinctively inhabits.
While Bush’s encouragement of international terrorists to “bring it on” rang with the kind of mindless bravado typical of phallically-insecure men from Texas, even at his most pretentious mush-mouthed good-ol’-boy moments, Bush could not match the deliberately malinformed posturing that Perry indulged in on his first full day as the GOP’s newest presidential candidate.
A master of the phony snarling-around-the-lip-of-a-longneck commentary style favored by rightwing populist wannabes, Perry has gagged up enough raw and bloodened rhetoric to keep a warehousefull of teabaggers feeding for a month. Reviving the birther ethos—if not the specific accusations—Perry started his campaign by asserting (a) that President Obama does not love his country; (b) that “the greatest threat to our country right now is this president…”; and (c) that Commander-in-Chief Obama does not merit the respect of the nation’s military service members.
Not satisfied that he had sufficiently chummed the waters to draw all the Republican sharks to him, Perry then added an actual physical threat to public officials who defy the demented policy ‘theories’ of the right: Discussing the topic of the Federal Reserve’s policy of quantitative easing, Perry (who earned himself a “D” in economics while studying in the highly competitive academic environment at that well-known Harvard upon the Brazos, Texas A&M) offered his considered views on the Fed’s approach to staving off a threat of destructive deflation: “Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treasonous in my opinion.” Emphasizing his point, Governor Perry added, “…if this guy prints more money between now and the election—I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.” Just to be clear for those who may be unfamiliar with Texas history, “pretty ugly down in Texas” involves a well-documented culture of lynching and vigilante law.*
But I do not want to be mistaken here for raising an alarm about how dangerous this Texas freak may really be. Quite the contrary; this guy is a clown. (After all, this is a presidential candidate who says out loud that he wants your vote so he can go to the White House and “work every day to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can.” Hey, that’s great Rick; that sounds like a goal you could actually accomplish!)
Now sure, clowns with power—much like toddlers with firearms—can present a real danger to the neighborhood. But this is 2011. That the American right has become a danger to civilization is not news. The real news is not that the right has dangerous ideas; it is that the American media continues to have so much trouble making clear and specific statements about how laughably incompetent and confused the ‘thinking’ on the right has become. Thanks to the media’s ‘even-handed’ treatment of the fucktards on the right, we run the real risk of anodizing their stupidity with a patina of legitimacy and a superabundance of genuine political power.
Stupidity is not dangerous; stupidity is wildly amusing. Incompetent intellectual functioning is not dangerous; treating it as if it stands on equal footing with competence is.
It is still not too long ago for even the notoriously amnesiac American electorate to recall the last time we handed a Texas fool the keys to the kingdom. This time, let’s not get our panties in a bind; let’s just be real sure to call a dope a dope.
I dunno what y’all on the right would do with some idiot who wants to make hisself president of these here Nyoonited States of ‘Merrca, but me I’m fixin’ to laugh my ass off.
* Hey, keep it up, Rick! Another once long-awaited Republican presidential primary savior from the 2008 campaign is ready for you to join him in history’s long shadow of obscurity: Former sage and statesman Fred Thompson can be found on TV pimping bad reverse-mortgage products to vulnerable senior citizens; he awaits your fate.
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