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Maybe you thought, after George W’s presidency, that at least it can’t get worse than that.
Well, don’t look now, but here comes worse! High-strutting out of Bush’s Texas, shooting from the lip, smugger and stupider than you would think possible, Rick Perry, the slap-happy Texas governor, says he’s ready to be president. This guy puts the dumb in dumfounding.
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In just his first couple of weeks as a candidate, he has turned prayer into a political spectacle, crowed ceaselessly that he’s the rooster who makes the economic sun come up, flat out lied that federal regulators were coming after farmers’ tractors, and declared that Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke (a Bush appointee) is a traitor who should get beaten up. Worst of all though was his flagrant insult to America’s military men and women fighting in the brutal Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
In a flabby roundhouse punch thrown at President Obama’s lack of military experience, Perry claimed that he would be the soldiers’ favorite because they’d want a commander-in-chief who’d “worn the uniform.” While it’s true that Perry “wore” the uniform as an Air Force transport pilot, he never got his uniform dirty, much less bloody. He mostly flew around the U.S. and Europe, hauling – as he himself once put it – “the colonel’s kitty litter.” Never went anywhere near a shooting war.
Real soldiers have a term for the likes of Perry, who strutted around as a warrior, but dodged any encounters with live munitions. They say that the loud-talking governor served in the “Chair Force.”
Let me put this as bluntly as I can: Rick Perry is a fraud. For him to suggest that he has “done what these men and women in the military are doing” is a grotesque insult. That alone says he’s not worthy of even being considered for the highest office in our land. Shame on him.