Texas Gov. Rick Perry fends off questions as to his sanity.
Texas Gov. Rick “I’ve Got Hair” Perry may have produced the most notable noise for yesterday’s so-called “TEA Parties.” Perry told a crowd in Austin — frightened that proposed tax increases on the richest Americans might somehow prevent them from owning AK-47s — that Texas could secede if it wanted to.
“Texas is a unique place. When we came into the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that,” Perry said. “My hope is that America and Washington in particular pays attention. We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that.”
Unfortunately for the dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks demagogue imitating a Texas governor, he was wrong about the state’s ability to leave the union. Oh well, I mean my state could leave the union as it did in 1861 during a war in which somewhere near 620,000 of our countrymen were killed. But if you’ve ever even touched a U.S. history book you might know how secession worked out for Texas and the rest of the remaining confederate states.
As Houston Chronicle writer R.G.Ratcliffe pointed out yesterday and something I wish more media types would have taken note of, Texas has the ability due to its admission deal with the U.S. to divide itself into five separate states, not to secede from the union.
Oops! But why let something strikingly erroneous, not to mention seditious, interfere when Perry is clearly playing to a crowd that includes racists and his like-minded reprobates when he he appears to be in for the political fight for his life in the governor’s race with U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey “Sis Boom Bah” Hutchison?
Now as I previously mentioned, Perry’s speech may not have overtly urged the overthrow of the U.S. government but it planted a very potent seed which could germinate in the minds of many of the lamebrains who cheered the governor on during his speech Wednesday. Maybe it’s just me but when the governor of the nation’s second largest state in both population and area advocates toppling the U.S. government, wouldn’t that send some kind of negative signal to the men and women who are fighting for their country (including Texas) in places the last administration sent us such as Afghanistan and Iraq? What about young Texas soldiers? What are they supposed to think?
I guess the fact that Perry said what he said in Texas instead of on an overseas stage makes his language okay with his fellow Republicans unlike when Texan Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks said her group was ashamed George W. Bush was from Texas. Those utterances, of course, prompted outrage by the likes of Sean Hannity leaving the Dixie Chicks facing a McCarthy-era-like blacklist and boycott for awhile. How soon we forget, huh?
Well it doesn’t matter when it comes to Republican politics which is what all of this — TEA Day, Rick Perry’s Dixie Chicks moment and the rest of the crap that goes with it — is. I guess the truth and fair play has no part when a segment of society is given a bill of goods such as those who felt they had to protest the “heavy-hand” of the federal government. The only alternative is for the ultra right wing of the Republican party to grow more angry and alienated from the GOP.
Although I am a native Texan — and still proud to be one despite foolish statements such as that by Gov. Good Hair — I am foremost an American. I served my country once and even though I am arthritic and falling apart after five decades, I would do it again if I had to do so.