Since I started writing here more than five years ago I have managed to heap quite a bit of scorn and whatever else I had handy for our well-coiffed Texas Gov. Rick “Good Hair” Perry.
First there was George W. then Perry that have been both a national and a personal pain in the ass for me. The latter is in part because I had to cover both governors as a reporter and neither were particularly inspiring either as subjects of newspaper articles nor as “statesmen.” I think the last time I covered an event with Perry as governor shows about how interesting he was to write about.
I can’t exactly remember where I was but it was somewhere in Central Texas. Some kind of “pollution-abating” dog-and-pony-show was going on and Rick Perry was there as governor to lend a sis-boom-bah to the event. After all the presentations were made and a few words were said by each of the speakers, including the governor, Good Hair himself asked the some half-dozen reporters if they had any questions.
“No, not really,” I told him. None of the other reporters there asked the governor anything as well, following my lead. I would like to think part of the reason is that the other media members were just waiting for me to write something so they could steal it. Nevertheless, that is the first time I think that I ever saw the media fail to ask questions of a governor — not to mention a governor of the state with both the second-largest size and population in the country — given the opportunity.
Perhaps now that Good Hair is on a bigger stage, seeking the Republican presidential nomination as he seems to be, every opportunity he gives to ask a question is a big deal to the media. That, and the fact that he seems to only do his talking to friendlies such as Fox News these day. I write these words as Perry is pushing a whole lot of red meat subjects for his “conservative base” (God, I hate those words almost as much as I despise the phrase “win-win.”) for the start of the new Texas legislative session. Anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, support for a federal Constitutional amendment for a balanced budget and so forth are all on his plate. All of these Perry considers as “emergencies” for the Lege to consider.
What an inspiring guy that Good Hair is. I wish he would get caught sleeping with an underage, gay horse.
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