Today, The Krait (Gail Collins of the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed page; Collins' distaff colleague on the Op-Ed page — Maureen Dowd — was nicknamed "The Cobra" by The Dubster aka POTUS 43.) bites Former Governor Goodhair on his way out the door of the State Capitol. Ben Sargent, the retired editorial cartoonist for the Austin Fishwrap captures the essence of Goodhair as he prepares to chase the brass ring in 2016:
"Candidateman" fits Goodhair to a T. The goofy sumbitch is gonna speak and dispel all doubt of his idiocy during the 2016 campaign. Of course the real idiots are the voters of Texas who elected and reelected this fool in the 2002, 2006 and 2010 gubernatorial elections. Thus the Lone Star State has suffered a little more than 14 years of Goodhair. (This includes the last two years of The Dubster's term after he became POTUS 43.) There is a double meaning to the "Texas Miracle." The employment statistics pale beside the unbelievable ability of the voters of Texas to vote for this loser again and again, and again.
If this is (fair & balanced) proof that Texas voters get the leaders they deserve, so be it.
[x NY FIshwrap]
Texas Is Sending You A Present
By Gail Collins
Tag Cloud of the following piece of writing
Rick Perry!
The man who has been governor of Texas since pterodactyls roamed the plains took his leave at the State Capitol this week. He is not saying anything for sure about running for president. Mum’s the word until springtime. However, he recently told a reporter that if voters want to break from the Obama era, “I am a very clear and compelling individual to support.”
Wow, the Republican race is getting to be like one of those crime shows where the detectives have to paste pictures all over the wall so they can keep the suspects straight. So many old friends popping up this month — Mitt Romney and now Rick Perry. The man who drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the car roof and the man who claims he shot a coyote while jogging. The animal lobby had better get out there and see how Jeb Bush feels about wolf hunting.
Almost everybody has a Rick Perry favorite moment. For 99 percent, it’s probably the dreaded “oops” debate when he announced that as president he was going to shutter three federal agencies — and then could only think of two.
And, yeah, that one was pretty good. However, I still cherish a television interview Perry did a few years earlier with Evan Smith of The Texas Tribune in which he defended abstinence-only sex education despite the state’s astronomical rates of teenage pregnancy.
“It works,” Perry said defiantly and totally erroneously.
“Can you give me a statistic suggesting it works?” asked Smith.
“I’m going to tell you from my own personal life. Abstinence works,” Perry replied. Smith was too discreet to press for details, but let’s hope it comes up during the campaign.
Perry had been governor of Texas for more than 14 years, an all-time record. In his farewell speech to the State Legislature, he reminded the lawmakers of all they’d been through together, including hurricanes, wildfires and the tragic disintegration of the Space Shuttle Columbia over Texas in 2003, although Perry called it “Space Shuttle Challenger,” which blew up in 1986.
No mention of his pending felony indictment for abuse of power. Perry tried to force a county district attorney to resign by threatening to veto the money for an office she runs that investigates public corruption. It’s a complicated story. First you learn that the D.A. in question had been arrested in a rather spectacular drunken-driving case, and you tilt a little toward Perry. Then you discover that two other county D.A.’s were charged with drunken driving during the Perry administration without attracting the wrath of the governor. Then you sort of get distracted by wondering what’s going on with Texas district attorneys.
We’ve got ages to work it out.
Perry bragged about the state’s economy, which he often refers to as “the Texas Miracle.” Really, we have not heard so much about miracles since Our Lady of Fatima. The state’s record of job creation is his big calling card to the presidential league, and once he starts harping on it again we’re going to wonder: Has Texas been growing so many jobs because Perry cut taxes and regulations? Or is it because Texas happens to be a state with warm weather, lots of space for cheap housing, a huge border with Mexico and massive oil and gas deposits? Is Perry a great leader or just conveniently located? Eventually, someone will repeat the old joke about being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple.
Perry’s signature job-building initiative is something called the Texas Enterprise Fund, which aims to persuade out-of-state companies to move to Texas, or expand there. One of its beneficiaries, Texas Institute for Genomic Medicine, got $50 million in return for creating what Perry said were more than 12,000 jobs. An investigation by The Wall Street Journal revealed the fund folk had been counting every single biotech job created anywhere in the state for the previous six years. Actually the number was more like 10.
But it’s great that the governor’s ambitions are forcing us to think a lot about Texas, a state that deserves more attention, having been home to only three of the last eight elected chief executives. Not even half! And although lawmakers from Texas currently lead six of the committees in the House of Representatives, that’s still under a third.
There’s also United States Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, making all the pre-presidential-campaign stops and offering an option to all of us who are yearning for a vision to the right of Rick Perry. I once threw out the possibility of an entire Republican ticket from the Lone Star State, and many readers desperately wrote to argue that that was unconstitutional. It might be fairer to say that the Constitution isn’t crazy about the idea.
We can figure that out down the line. Meanwhile, Perry and Cruz could both be in the presidential debates. Let’s see who’s better at counting to three. Ω
[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 took a leave in order to complete America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. Collins returned to the Times as a columnist in July 2007. Collins has a BA (journalism) from Marquette University and an MA (government) from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Gail Collins’s newest book is As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda (2012).]
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