Time for another Gooberhead Award – presented periodically to those in the news who have their tongues going 100 miles an hour, but forgot to put their brains in gear.
Today’s goober is the governor of my own state of Texas, Rick Perry. Who would’ve thought that any state could come up with a governor who’d be shallower, less compassionate, and more subservient to corporate interests than our previous gubernatorial embarrassment, George W. Bush? But, we did it!
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Perry is strutting around like a banty rooster, cockadoodle-doodling about how, by gollies, he ain’t taking half-a-billion dollars in stinkin’ stimulus money from Barack Obama to extend unemployment benefits to the fast-rising number of Texans who’re out of work. To receive that money, says the guv, our state would be required to modernize its miserly unemployment rules to be a tad more generous to those who lose their jobs.
Uh-uh, he snapped, declaring that in a couple of years when the stimulus plan expires, it would then be up to the state to help unemployed folks, and he didn’t want Texans looking to Austin when they’re down and out. He then declared: “This is exactly how addicts get hooked on drugs.” Yeah, Rick, folks rally do want to get hooked on the $392 a week that Texas unemployment pays.
Having compared out-of-work families to junkies, our gooberheaded guv proceeded to crow that he would, however, be happy to take $1.2 billion from Obama’s package to help a constituency for whom he feels deep compassion: toll road operators. Infamously known here as “Toll Road Rick,” Perry has tried for eight years to strap Texans down with a network of privatized highways operated by tollway hucksters – who just happen to have put more than $350,000 into his campaigns.
Stiffing working people and spreading corporate welfare. That’s our Goober!
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“Give Perry a Brain Scan,” Austin Chronicle, March 6, 2009.
“Politicians Get Burned Paving Texas Backwards, From the Top Down,” www.tpj.org, January 7, 2009.
“Perry Urged to take funds for unemployment,” Austin American Statesman, March 4, 2009.
“Help Texas’ growing legion of jobless,” Austin American Statesman, March 8, 2009.
“Citizen groups: Slow down on Texas road spending,” www.forbes.com, March, 3, 2009.
Rick Perry Still Peddling Failed Economic Policy,” Texas Democratic Party Press Release, February 25, 2009
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