The Krait Bites Goodhair! Ptooooie!

The Krait hits the nail on the head today: The Dumbos Are Stupid! Case in point is the goober who sits in the Lone Star Governor's chair: Rick (Goodhair) Perry (R-TX). On Tax Day 2009, Goodhair showed up at the "Tax Protest aka Tea Party" at the Austin City Hall. Goodhair demagogued and the goofballs waved U.S. flags while shouting "Secede!" For the record, Texas nearly breaks even in federal spending per dollar of federal taxes paid.

(NM ranks first with $2 in federal spending for every buck remitted in federal taxes; Alaska, where the secessionist flame burns brightly, ranks third with $1.84 in federal spending for every dollar in taxes. Texas ranks thirty-fifth at $0.94 in federal spending for every federal tax dollar sent to DC from the Lone Star State.)

If Goodhair wants to lead a tax revolt, let him go to New Jersey — the last-place Garden State receives just $0.61 in federal spending for every buck it sends to DC. Goodhair would fit right in among NJ residents; his lettuce rivals the rug worn by Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt) in "The Sopranos." If this is a (fair & balanced) oxymoron — with emphasis on "moron," so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Twitters From Texas
By Gail Collins

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administration american anti-tax austin calls campaign comes continued cotton country crowd demands dissolve entire failure farmer federal feel flag full government love noticed obama party pays people perry protests quarter really recent remember reports secede seems send signs special states tax texan texas twitters understood union washington waving wear yelling

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Let us pause to consider Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, and his feelings about seceding from the union.

This all started during the recent anti-tax protests. You undoubtedly saw the pictures of the demonstrations full of people wearing teabags or tricorner hats who kept comparing themselves to the founding fathers at the Boston Tea Party. True, when it comes to taxation without representation, they were slightly different from colonial New Englanders on the minor point of having representation. But let’s not be picky.

Have you ever noticed that the states where anti-tax sentiment is strongest are frequently the same states that get way more back from the federal government than they send in? Alaska gets $1.84 for every tax dollar it sends to Washington, which is a rate of return even Bernard Madoff never pretended to achieve. Yet there they were in Ketchikan waving “Taxed Enough Already!” signs and demanding an end to federal spending.

Also, have you noticed how places that pride themselves on being superpatriotic seem to have the most people who want to abandon the country entirely and set up shop on their own?

“What a great crowd,” Perry twittered, referring to the protesters he addressed in Austin, some of whom were waving American flags and yelling “Secede!”

Afterward, he told reporters that Texas had come into the union with a unique right “to leave if we decided to do that.” This is a beloved piece of state folklore despite its unfortunate drawback of being totally untrue.

“My hope is that America and Washington in particular pays attention,” Perry continued. “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.”

Later, while Perry was holding another press conference after signing a bill extolling states rights, he repeated the part about this being “a great union” but then said that he understood the secessionists’ feelings.

This is not exactly a ringing endorsement. It’s as if your spouse pointedly noted that it’s extremely easy to dissolve marriages these days, then added that although he was not currently advocating a divorce, he certainly understood why other people who knew you both might think it was a good idea.

And what about my country, right or wrong? Weren’t there complaints, some from Texan quarters, during the last election that Barack Obama seemed insufficiently up front about his love of country? Isn’t threatening to dissolve the union over the stimulus package a little less American than failure to wear a flag pin?

Remember the time when Michelle Obama said, in a moment she spent an entire campaign trying to take back, that 2008 was the first time she could remember ever feeling really proud of her country? Can you imagine how the conservative base would have reacted if she said that it was the first time she didn’t feel like renouncing her citizenship?

And how, by the way, can you stand at a rally waving the American flag while yelling “Secede”? It’s like an employer handing out “worker of the week” certificates to employees who just learned that he was moving the plant to Mexico.

Can’t feel the love.

Perry, who is the sort of person who calls other guys “dude,” used to be a cotton farmer, a group that seems to have a special talent for combining rugged individualism with intransigent demands for government assistance. Even as we speak, the Obama administration budget-cutters are trying to end a longstanding federal practice of paying the costs of storing the entire national cotton crop every year. No other farmers get this kind of special treatment, and I am sure Perry’s failure to mention it when he calls for an end to corporate bailouts is a terrible oversight that will be corrected immediately.

The big mystery here is why the tax-protest crowds were behaving as if the world was coming to an end when all Obama’s infant presidency has done is lower taxes for a vast majority of the public. And why people like Perry seem to feel compelled to egg them on.

The answer is that what’s left of the Republican Party is intent on cutting off the knees of the administration before it actually manages to fulfill any campaign promises on reducing the huge economic gap between the top 5 percent of the country and the rest of the populace. In pursuit of that mission, fortune favors the hysterical and rewards politicians who behave like gerbils that just bit into an electric wire.

We don’t want to blame all Texans for the high jinks in Austin. It’s a state full of lovely people, three-fourths of whom, according to a recent Rasmussen Reports poll, have no desire whatsoever to secede from the United States.

But Perry really understands how that other quarter feels. ♥

[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a sequel to her book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. Collins returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007. Besides America's Women, which was published in 2003, Ms. Collins is the author of Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics, and The Millennium Book, which she co-authored with her husband, Dan Collins. Her new book is about American women since 1960. Collins has a degree in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. in government from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.]

Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company

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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves