Richard Ellis/Getty Images
Gov. Rick Perry of Texas announced his candidacy for president at the RedState Gathering, a meeting of conservative activists, in Charleston, S.C., on Saturday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/us/politics/14perry.html?ref=global-home
All,
Rick Perry is nothing but the Ku Klux Klan + the Tea Party in a suit and therefore a very dangerous and deceptive man. BEWARE! (for real). That he, like the notorious Bushwhacker 2, has been Governor of Texas for the past decade (!) is enough by itself to indicate just how stubbornly backward and violently reactionary the Republican candidate for the Presidency is going to be in 2012. Get ready for the most openly racist, brazenly cruel, and lowdown dirty dog national campaign since the post Reconstruction era of the 1880s and '90s (remember the "black codes"?--well if you don't you will certainly find out exactly what it was--and still is--quick, fast, and in a hurry...Here come the paddyrollers once again and guess who they're looking for? (as usual)...
Kofi
Promising Better Direction, Perry Enters Race
By Ashley Parker
August 13, 2011
New York Times
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Gov. Rick Perry of Texas announced Saturday that he was running for president, declaring it was “time to get America working again” as he sought to offer the Republican Party a well-rounded candidate who appeals to fiscal conservatives and can also rally the evangelical base.
As many of his fellow candidates flooded Iowa over the weekend to woo voters at the Ames Straw Poll, Mr. Perry headed here to announce that he was seeking the nomination at the RedState Gathering, an annual convention of conservative bloggers.
“I came to South Carolina because I will not sit back and accept the path that America is on, because a great country requires a better direction, because a renewed nation needs a new president,” he said.
“With the support of my family and unwavering belief in the goodness of America, I declare to you today as a candidate for president of the United States.”
And with that, Mr. Perry, 61, whose spectral presence has lingered over the Republican primary contest — he was even the topic of a question at Thursday night’s Republican debate in Iowa — officially became a candidate for the Republican nomination.
Mr. Perry’s entrance into an already crowded field is expected to reconfigure the dynamics of the race, offering Republicans a fiscal and social conservative who not only appeals to the party’s base but can also challenge Mitt Romney, who is leading in many polls, on jobs and the economy.
His announcement reverberated 1,200 miles away in Iowa, where thousands of Republicans gathered to size up the party’s candidates, who delivered speeches and asked for support in the Ames Straw Poll. Though Mr. Perry’s name was not on the ballot, a group called Americans for Rick Perry urged people to list him as a write-in candidate.
In a sea of people wearing green shirts for Tim Pawlenty, orange shirts for Michele Bachmann and red shirts for Ron Paul, dozens of maroon shirts bearing Mr. Perry’s name stood out in the crowd. He is set to travel to Iowa on Sunday, where he intends to spend three days in the state introducing himself to voters who will open the nominating contest early next year.
“He’s an attractive candidate,” Tim Gibson, 59, of Clive, Iowa, said as he stood in line at the straw poll waiting to cast his vote for Mr. Perry. “He brings leadership to the race. My top priority is winning the election, and I want to vote for someone who can win.”
Mr. Perry is the longest-serving governor of Texas, having been elected to three full terms and having held the position for more than 10 years. He is known as a fierce and skilled campaigner, as well as a prodigious fund-raiser. In past campaigns, he has eked out victories and also come from behind to win by large margins. He also seems to have uncanny luck and the ability to recognize and capitalize on it.
“He becomes immediately one of the top three candidates, and he fills a vacuum — of someone who is a conservative, who has credibility and can speak to the fiscal conservative, anti-big-government and anti-Washington crowd, but he’s also a social conservative,” said Matthew Dowd, a former strategist for President George W. Bush. “At least in the short term, he is a major disruption in the race.”
Mr. Perry was heading to New Hampshire on Saturday evening and then to Iowa, but what he does in the coming weeks will be the real test of his candidacy, said Republicans who were waiting to see if he could withstand the scrutiny that comes with a presidential campaign.
“He either gets in and gets through the gantlet of the first month or so and consistently moves forward and wins the nomination, or he’s got this terrific flameout,” Mr. Dowd said. “There’s no middle ground.”
Mr. Romney has positioned himself as the candidate with real-world experience who can turn the economy around and create jobs, and Mr. Perry will compete with him on that front, having ushered in a decade of job growth in Texas. But not everyone is convinced that Mr. Perry’s tenure has been great for Texas.
“He’s cutting services in order to maintain really low tax rates, and so many of the jobs he’s created are these minimum-wage jobs, not these living-wage jobs,” said Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas. “I think he has, as they would say here in Texas, plenty of ’splaining to do about his positions.”
Mr. Perry, a fifth-generation Texan, grew up in a rural community in Paint Creek, on a tenant farm nestled in the West Texas plains, an area known as the Big Empty. Mr. Perry, an Eagle Scout, told Texas Monthly last year, “There were three things to do in Paint Creek: school, church and Boy Scouts.” His mother, he said, was a good seamstress who still made his underwear when he went off to college at Texas A&M University, from which he graduated in 1972 with a major in animal science.
Mr. Perry, a Methodist who regularly attends an evangelical megachurch near his home and hosted a large “Nation in Crisis” prayer rally this month in Houston, is a natural candidate to appeal to his party’s religious right, as well as to parts of its Tea Party contingent.
In some ways, Mr. Perry embraced Tea Party ideals before the party itself was popular, winning re-election in 2010 — first by beating Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison in a primary challenge for governor, and then defeating Bill White, the former mayor of Houston — by positioning himself as an outsider, despite his two terms as governor. He pitted Texas against Washington, and prevailed.
Mr. Perry has walked a fine line on immigration, trying to balance his state’s business interests with calls for hard-line reform and border security, and that may not endear him with some Republicans, especially those aligned with the Tea Party.
In 2001, he signed his state’s version of the Dream Act, a bill that allowed children of illegal immigrants to attend state universities as long as they were working toward citizenship and had graduated from a Texas high school. Yet a decade later, he led the push for a “sanctuary city” bill that would have allowed the police to question people they picked up about their immigration status.
Mr. Perry is Mr. Bush’s direct successor as governor, and with his Texas twang and swagger, he can seem like a caricature of the former president. Voters trying to figure out what they think of Mr. Perry will invariably wrestle with their feelings about Mr. Bush, which, Republicans say, may become a potential liability if he makes it to the general election.
Though Mr. Perry is a disciplined campaigner, he has been known to get carried away when speaking and sometimes finds himself trying to rein in his own statements. In 2009, he dabbled with secession.
“There really was considerable talk down here about all the talk of secession that bubbled up around his gubernatorial campaign,” Mr. Doggett said. “So that when he started talking about running for president, the question was: of which country?”
Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Ames, Iowa.
All,
Rick Perry is nothing but the Ku Klux Klan + the Tea Party in a suit and therefore a very dangerous and deceptive man. BEWARE! (for real). That he, like the notorious Bushwhacker 2, has been Governor of Texas for the past decade (!) is enough by itself to indicate just how stubbornly backward and violently reactionary the Republican candidate for the Presidency is going to be in 2012. Get ready for the most openly racist, brazenly cruel, and lowdown dirty dog national campaign since the post Reconstruction era of the 1880s and '90s (remember the "black codes"?--well if you don't you will certainly find out exactly what it was--and still is--quick, fast, and in a hurry...Here come the paddyrollers once again and guess who they're looking for? (as usual)...
Kofi
Promising Better Direction, Perry Enters Race
By Ashley Parker
August 13, 2011
New York Times
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Gov. Rick Perry of Texas announced Saturday that he was running for president, declaring it was “time to get America working again” as he sought to offer the Republican Party a well-rounded candidate who appeals to fiscal conservatives and can also rally the evangelical base.
As many of his fellow candidates flooded Iowa over the weekend to woo voters at the Ames Straw Poll, Mr. Perry headed here to announce that he was seeking the nomination at the RedState Gathering, an annual convention of conservative bloggers.
“I came to South Carolina because I will not sit back and accept the path that America is on, because a great country requires a better direction, because a renewed nation needs a new president,” he said.
“With the support of my family and unwavering belief in the goodness of America, I declare to you today as a candidate for president of the United States.”
And with that, Mr. Perry, 61, whose spectral presence has lingered over the Republican primary contest — he was even the topic of a question at Thursday night’s Republican debate in Iowa — officially became a candidate for the Republican nomination.
Mr. Perry’s entrance into an already crowded field is expected to reconfigure the dynamics of the race, offering Republicans a fiscal and social conservative who not only appeals to the party’s base but can also challenge Mitt Romney, who is leading in many polls, on jobs and the economy.
His announcement reverberated 1,200 miles away in Iowa, where thousands of Republicans gathered to size up the party’s candidates, who delivered speeches and asked for support in the Ames Straw Poll. Though Mr. Perry’s name was not on the ballot, a group called Americans for Rick Perry urged people to list him as a write-in candidate.
In a sea of people wearing green shirts for Tim Pawlenty, orange shirts for Michele Bachmann and red shirts for Ron Paul, dozens of maroon shirts bearing Mr. Perry’s name stood out in the crowd. He is set to travel to Iowa on Sunday, where he intends to spend three days in the state introducing himself to voters who will open the nominating contest early next year.
“He’s an attractive candidate,” Tim Gibson, 59, of Clive, Iowa, said as he stood in line at the straw poll waiting to cast his vote for Mr. Perry. “He brings leadership to the race. My top priority is winning the election, and I want to vote for someone who can win.”
Mr. Perry is the longest-serving governor of Texas, having been elected to three full terms and having held the position for more than 10 years. He is known as a fierce and skilled campaigner, as well as a prodigious fund-raiser. In past campaigns, he has eked out victories and also come from behind to win by large margins. He also seems to have uncanny luck and the ability to recognize and capitalize on it.
“He becomes immediately one of the top three candidates, and he fills a vacuum — of someone who is a conservative, who has credibility and can speak to the fiscal conservative, anti-big-government and anti-Washington crowd, but he’s also a social conservative,” said Matthew Dowd, a former strategist for President George W. Bush. “At least in the short term, he is a major disruption in the race.”
Mr. Perry was heading to New Hampshire on Saturday evening and then to Iowa, but what he does in the coming weeks will be the real test of his candidacy, said Republicans who were waiting to see if he could withstand the scrutiny that comes with a presidential campaign.
“He either gets in and gets through the gantlet of the first month or so and consistently moves forward and wins the nomination, or he’s got this terrific flameout,” Mr. Dowd said. “There’s no middle ground.”
Mr. Romney has positioned himself as the candidate with real-world experience who can turn the economy around and create jobs, and Mr. Perry will compete with him on that front, having ushered in a decade of job growth in Texas. But not everyone is convinced that Mr. Perry’s tenure has been great for Texas.
“He’s cutting services in order to maintain really low tax rates, and so many of the jobs he’s created are these minimum-wage jobs, not these living-wage jobs,” said Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas. “I think he has, as they would say here in Texas, plenty of ’splaining to do about his positions.”
Mr. Perry, a fifth-generation Texan, grew up in a rural community in Paint Creek, on a tenant farm nestled in the West Texas plains, an area known as the Big Empty. Mr. Perry, an Eagle Scout, told Texas Monthly last year, “There were three things to do in Paint Creek: school, church and Boy Scouts.” His mother, he said, was a good seamstress who still made his underwear when he went off to college at Texas A&M University, from which he graduated in 1972 with a major in animal science.
Mr. Perry, a Methodist who regularly attends an evangelical megachurch near his home and hosted a large “Nation in Crisis” prayer rally this month in Houston, is a natural candidate to appeal to his party’s religious right, as well as to parts of its Tea Party contingent.
In some ways, Mr. Perry embraced Tea Party ideals before the party itself was popular, winning re-election in 2010 — first by beating Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison in a primary challenge for governor, and then defeating Bill White, the former mayor of Houston — by positioning himself as an outsider, despite his two terms as governor. He pitted Texas against Washington, and prevailed.
Mr. Perry has walked a fine line on immigration, trying to balance his state’s business interests with calls for hard-line reform and border security, and that may not endear him with some Republicans, especially those aligned with the Tea Party.
In 2001, he signed his state’s version of the Dream Act, a bill that allowed children of illegal immigrants to attend state universities as long as they were working toward citizenship and had graduated from a Texas high school. Yet a decade later, he led the push for a “sanctuary city” bill that would have allowed the police to question people they picked up about their immigration status.
Mr. Perry is Mr. Bush’s direct successor as governor, and with his Texas twang and swagger, he can seem like a caricature of the former president. Voters trying to figure out what they think of Mr. Perry will invariably wrestle with their feelings about Mr. Bush, which, Republicans say, may become a potential liability if he makes it to the general election.
Though Mr. Perry is a disciplined campaigner, he has been known to get carried away when speaking and sometimes finds himself trying to rein in his own statements. In 2009, he dabbled with secession.
“There really was considerable talk down here about all the talk of secession that bubbled up around his gubernatorial campaign,” Mr. Doggett said. “So that when he started talking about running for president, the question was: of which country?”
Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Ames, Iowa.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/162782/rick-perrys-neocon-friends?rel=emailNation
All,
More on the Klansman Governor from Texas running for President and his neocon/protofascist posse...
Kofi
Rick Perry's Neocon Friends
by Robert Dreyfuss
August 15, 2011
The Nation
No one seriously believes that Republicans will nominate the wild-eyed, certifiable Michele Bachmann for president, and Romney the Robot isn’t setting Tea Party hearts aflutter. So it looks like Rick Perry, the Bible-thumping, secessionist hawk—who’s already assembling a team of neoconservative advisers—will get the nod to challenge President Obama in 2012.
Were Perry to win, his victory—especially if the GOP, as seems likely, conquers the Senate—will speed the United States down the merry path to oblivion at least a couple of decades before the rise of China and India do anyway. Worryingly, Perry might be exactly the know-nothing hawk who decides to use US military power to forestall America’s inevitable decline by force, even if it leads to World War III. Like Tea Party fanatics who courted financial Armageddon by insisting that reneging on US debt obligations wouldn’t be so bad, Perry’s own Tea Party Pentagon, staffed by neoconservatives, might decide the nuclear Armageddon wouldn’t be so bad, either, as long as it makes the world understand how exceptional American exceptionalism is.
Indeed, as James Lindsey points out [1] for the Council on Foreign Relations, in his screed, Fed Up: Our Fight to Save America from Washington, a book that he allegedly wrote, Perry declares that “exceptional” America has to be prepared for war with China and India:
“We are now confronted with the rise of new economic and military powerhouses in China and India, as well as a Russia that is increasingly aggressive and troublesome to its neighbors and former satellite nations that are struggling to maintain their relatively newfound independence. There is no reason to believe that armed conflict with any major power is imminent, but the world is rapidly changing, and the United States must be prepared for the ramifications of shifting balances of power.”
And Perry adds, concerning the “reset” in relations with Russia:
“It was a slap in the face to a number of our allies. As a Wall Street Journal article put it, ‘Some prominent figures in the region, such as former Polish President Lech Walesa, worried the new US administration was turning away from its traditional allies in Central Europe to placate Russia’.… Surely we can’t be serious?”
In his speech proclaiming his candidacy, in which he said elegantly that “we don’t need a president who apologizes for America,” and he added: “What I learned in my 20’s traveling the globe as an Air Force pilot, our current president has yet to acknowledge in his 50s—that we are the most exceptional nation on the face of the earth.”
No surprise, of course, that Perry is consorting with left-over neocons [2] from the Bush administration, as National Review reported in July, such as Douglas Feith, the ¨uber-hawk who oversaw the war in Iraq, and Bill Luti, Feith’s compatriot in the Bush White House, who joined with Vice President Cheney to persuade Bush that an unprovoked attack on Iraq was the right thing to do, and Dan Blumenthal, another Bush veteran who’s taken up residence at the American Enterprise Institute. Though the Tea Party types who support nut-libertarian Ron Paul oppose wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan and want to reduce the size of the Pentagon, Perry appeals to the other side of the Tea Party and to traditional Republican hawks who oppose the libertarians’ outright isolationism. Indeed, a source close to Perry told National Review [3] that Perry does not exhibit “the neo-isolationism that you might expect from certain people [close to] the Tea Party.” (According to Politico, Donald Rumseld is setting up Perry’s encounters [4] with the neocons.)
Like this blog post? Read it on The Nation’s free iPhone App, NationNow. [5]
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/blog/162782/rick-perrys-neocon-friends
Links:
[1] http://blogs.cfr.org/lindsay/2011/08/13/campaign-2012-hello-rick-perry-gop-presidential-candidate/
[2] http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/272021/perrys-briefing-katrina-trinko
[3] http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/273717/perry-no-isolationist-foreign-policy-katrina-trinko#
[4] http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0711/Rumsfeld_had_role_in_Perry_meeting.html
[5] http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nationnow/id399704758?mt=8
All,
More on the Klansman Governor from Texas running for President and his neocon/protofascist posse...
Kofi
Rick Perry's Neocon Friends
by Robert Dreyfuss
August 15, 2011
The Nation
No one seriously believes that Republicans will nominate the wild-eyed, certifiable Michele Bachmann for president, and Romney the Robot isn’t setting Tea Party hearts aflutter. So it looks like Rick Perry, the Bible-thumping, secessionist hawk—who’s already assembling a team of neoconservative advisers—will get the nod to challenge President Obama in 2012.
Were Perry to win, his victory—especially if the GOP, as seems likely, conquers the Senate—will speed the United States down the merry path to oblivion at least a couple of decades before the rise of China and India do anyway. Worryingly, Perry might be exactly the know-nothing hawk who decides to use US military power to forestall America’s inevitable decline by force, even if it leads to World War III. Like Tea Party fanatics who courted financial Armageddon by insisting that reneging on US debt obligations wouldn’t be so bad, Perry’s own Tea Party Pentagon, staffed by neoconservatives, might decide the nuclear Armageddon wouldn’t be so bad, either, as long as it makes the world understand how exceptional American exceptionalism is.
Indeed, as James Lindsey points out [1] for the Council on Foreign Relations, in his screed, Fed Up: Our Fight to Save America from Washington, a book that he allegedly wrote, Perry declares that “exceptional” America has to be prepared for war with China and India:
“We are now confronted with the rise of new economic and military powerhouses in China and India, as well as a Russia that is increasingly aggressive and troublesome to its neighbors and former satellite nations that are struggling to maintain their relatively newfound independence. There is no reason to believe that armed conflict with any major power is imminent, but the world is rapidly changing, and the United States must be prepared for the ramifications of shifting balances of power.”
And Perry adds, concerning the “reset” in relations with Russia:
“It was a slap in the face to a number of our allies. As a Wall Street Journal article put it, ‘Some prominent figures in the region, such as former Polish President Lech Walesa, worried the new US administration was turning away from its traditional allies in Central Europe to placate Russia’.… Surely we can’t be serious?”
In his speech proclaiming his candidacy, in which he said elegantly that “we don’t need a president who apologizes for America,” and he added: “What I learned in my 20’s traveling the globe as an Air Force pilot, our current president has yet to acknowledge in his 50s—that we are the most exceptional nation on the face of the earth.”
No surprise, of course, that Perry is consorting with left-over neocons [2] from the Bush administration, as National Review reported in July, such as Douglas Feith, the ¨uber-hawk who oversaw the war in Iraq, and Bill Luti, Feith’s compatriot in the Bush White House, who joined with Vice President Cheney to persuade Bush that an unprovoked attack on Iraq was the right thing to do, and Dan Blumenthal, another Bush veteran who’s taken up residence at the American Enterprise Institute. Though the Tea Party types who support nut-libertarian Ron Paul oppose wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan and want to reduce the size of the Pentagon, Perry appeals to the other side of the Tea Party and to traditional Republican hawks who oppose the libertarians’ outright isolationism. Indeed, a source close to Perry told National Review [3] that Perry does not exhibit “the neo-isolationism that you might expect from certain people [close to] the Tea Party.” (According to Politico, Donald Rumseld is setting up Perry’s encounters [4] with the neocons.)
Like this blog post? Read it on The Nation’s free iPhone App, NationNow. [5]
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/blog/162782/rick-perrys-neocon-friends
Links:
[1] http://blogs.cfr.org/lindsay/2011/08/13/campaign-2012-hello-rick-perry-gop-presidential-candidate/
[2] http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/272021/perrys-briefing-katrina-trinko
[3] http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/273717/perry-no-isolationist-foreign-policy-katrina-trinko#
[4] http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0711/Rumsfeld_had_role_in_Perry_meeting.html
[5] http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nationnow/id399704758?mt=8
