Rick Perry declares to run for President

The savior has arisen; Rick Perry has announced that he is a candidate for President of the United States.  He started his announcement speech in the Red state of South Carolina.  There are many military bases in that area.  I was stationed at Donaldson Air Force Base for a shot time in 1961 and 2.  In a hypocritical and calloused introduction to his speech, Perry used the death of 30 brave Americans to gain the sympathy of his friendly audience.  He chose to have a “moment” to remember those who died in Afghanistan when their Chinook Helicopter was shot down by a rocket propelled grenade.  That would set the tone for how I would view Perry for the rest of the speech, as a hypocrite who would stoop to using the deaths of those troops for his own political gain.  It made me want to puke.

More was coming as he started off on his crazy right-wing rant against the government and President Obama.  This man, who for 27 years has drawn a government check, had the nerve to say that he wanted to make Washington D.C. “inconsequential in your lives”.  He reached back to the Reagan years when that President would say that “government is not a solution to our problems, it is the problem”.  Well, it certainly was when Reagan was President.  He had this country involved in brutal killings all around the world.  His most famous criminal act was to send mercenaries to Nicaragua where 50,000 innocent civilians were killed by contra rebels supported by the Reagan administration and funded with Reagan’s arms for hostages fiasco engineered by Oliver North from the basement of the White House.
    

Perry railed against the national debt and tried to lay the blame on Barack Obama.  The truth is that the great bulk of our national debt was accumulated by Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.  Obama inherited a recession and a mountain of debt caused, in the most part, by the three Republican Presidents, the many military adventures of Reagan, Bush I and Bush II and the George W. Bush tax cuts that have starved the United States Treasury for 10 years.   Perry promises no tax increases and more spending cuts.  That is like trying to cure a starving man by withholding food and water.

The most unnerving part thing about his speech was his “down home” Texas style of speaking that was so reminiscent of George W. Bush.  His ideology is very much the same and his style of governing would be exactly the same mistaken policies of Dubya’s eight years in office.  Praying to the lord will not help to improve our unemployment rates and put food on dinner tables or to relieve those who have lost their homes through unemployment and foreclosures.  If prayer worked on important issues like reviving the Bush economy, I am certain that we would be in a full blown recovery by now.  I have no doubt that even the most jaded of us would pray if we were in the same boat as so many of our fellow Americans.

Rick Perry was a poor college student who earned more C’s and D’s than B’s.  He got no A’s or F’s but was put on academic probation for poor performance.  It scares me to know that the United States Air Force trained him to fly C-130s because, knowing his intelligence level, it makes me wonder If  the pilots who flew the aircraft that I rode in were as intellectually challenged as Perry.  I strapped my parachutes on tightly, but they would have been much tighter if I had known my pilots were intellectual light weights like Perry and George W. Bush.

Well, now that the Iowa straw poll has anointed Michelle Balkman as their choice for President, and Rick Perry has committed, there are at least two mentally challenged candidates for the office of President.  It seems to me, that if the American people will pay attention in 2012, Barack Obama will be re-elected.  My hope is that, in his second term, the President will pull his man pants on and smack the Tea Party Republicans around like a punching bag.  In my mind, the President has not taken strong stands and fought hard enough for progressive programs that have helped to make this country great.  He must challenge the Republicans and force them to increase taxes on their rich donors and big corporations in order to bring our deficits under control.


Spending cuts cannot create jobs, they destroy jobs.  When businesses cannot sell their products and services, they will not create jobs, they will cut them.  That is the mess that we are in now.  This country must spend money on roads, bridges, education, health care, police and fire protection.  We need to spend to create jobs, and those who have jobs will spend to create demand.  When demand increases businesses and the rich will make more money just as they always do. They should want a strong stimulus program that will create business for them and jobs for their workers.

Oh, and our new presidential candidate is also a fellow who has said he wants Texas to secede from the union.  He and Todd Palin, Sara's husband, have both apparently forgotten or never learned their history in school.  The secession question was settled in the 1860s with the end of the Civil War.

Cartoon thanks to Stephen Stone

Rick Perry bio:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Perry#Early_life
Arms for hostages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair