In his recent epic
rant Rick Perry heaped his wrath on Donald Trump, the leading Republican Presidential candidate so far, for being a "cancer on conservatism." As one of the many Presidential Republican candidates, Rick Perry railed against Donald Trump the Terrible for bashing John McCain's military service, among other reasons.
Puffed up like a rooster an indignant Rick Perry asked Trump:
"I can only ask as Senator Welch did of Senator McCarthy, 'Have you no sense of decency, sir?'"
Oops! (Rick Perry forgot that he was part of the
Swift Boat character assassination plot against John Kerry's distinguished military service in 2004. So was St. Jeb Bush.)
I have to admit that I laughed out loud when I heard have you no decency coming from Rick Perry. Decency?
What would Jim Crow Rick Perry know about decency? After all, this is the Governor who imposed one of the toughest voter ID laws in the country. It is such a repressive law that it disenfranchised over
600,000 Texans from their right to vote in 2014. A federal judge equated it to a
poll tax. Throwing 600,000 registered voters under the bus is the real decent thing to do, heh?
As Governor Rick Perry has also made it next to impossible for low income women to obtain abortions,contraceptive counseling, medications, devices and various cancer screenings in the state. He and his Party's war on Planned Parenthood has been especially brutal.
Rick Perry and his colleagues who rail against government did a fine job of imposing big government on women's reproductive choices. Off to the south of border flea markets, we send you.
And our Governor, who lectured another Republican about basic human decency (which has become a lol moment these days) presided over the state with the highest number of uninsured residents. And our former Governor who can make very cruel conservative decisions with apparent ease, refused to accept federally expanded Medicaid. His decision was based on sheer spite, rigid right wing ideology and little else. Yes indeed. Rick Perry ignored the powerful arguments put forth by health care professionals.
And so there's a large segment of the population here that are left with the old Republican plan for health care.
Don't get sick. If you do get sick die quickly.
The list of Rick Perry's mean-spirited conservative decisions is a very long one. I am sure if he gains any traction in the primary race his opponents will be more than happy to shine a laser focused light on Rick Perry's long record as Governor Cruel.
But as far as Trump being a cancer on conservatism many see Donald Trump as the embodiment of conservatism.
Please follow me below the orange gerrymander to see how.
Rick Perry beat his Republican opponents to become the Anti-Trump candidate.
Donald Trump’s ascendance in the 2016 Republican polls has proved to be something of a boon for lower tier candidates looking to bask in the corona of Trump’s enormous media spotlight. Among those candidates, no one has done more to position himself as the anti-Trump than former Texas governor Rick Perry. Eagerly responding to Trump’s unending stream of insults and provocations, Perry’s been throwing out denunciation after denunciation, arguing that Trump is unfit to serve as president. His campaign has been trolling The Donald on Twitter, retweeting the racist billionaire skidmark’s past praise of Perry. Now he’s taken to referring to Trump as a “cancer” on conservatism.
But Donald Trump is not a cancer on conservatism. Today's perverted conservatism is the cancer.
snip...Trump isn’t a problem for Republicans because he represents a perversion of conservatism. He’s a problem because he represents conservatism too well.
Trump’s rise in the polls is attributable in some part to his celebrity and his knack for drawing media attention, but it’s also true that the outlandish nonsense he says about immigrant rapists and building a giant wall on the southern border resonates with a significant portion of the Republican electorate. This is not some unpredictable accident. The official policy of the Republican Party is to be overtly hostile to undocumented immigrants and to treat them with as much disdain as can be mustered. They do this because even the slightest hint of non-hostility to immigrants will open up Republican officeholders to charges that they’re pro-“amnesty,” and that’s when the primary challengers start filing their paperwork. Rick Perry understands this better than most Republicans: during his 2011 presidential run he was raked over the coals by conservatives after he chastised Republicans as heartless for opposing in-state tuitions for undocumented immigrant students.
It is notable that Rick Perry showed compassion for college students whose parents are undocumented.
here’s also the recurring phenomenon of Republican base voters flocking to candidates embody the “toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense” that Perry laments. In the minds of voters and activists, candidates who freely and forcefully say crazy shit are merely “saying what needs to be said.” This veneration of the willingness to be “un-PC” is a natural reaction to the many years of griping from conservative media and Republican officeholders that liberals and the mainstream press are trying to police their speech. Before Trump joined the 2016 fray, Ben Carson was the chief beneficiary of this phenomenon, drawing rave reviews from the activist right as he compared America under Barack Obama to Hitler’s Germany.
And so while Rick Perry makes the argument that Trump is a tumor within his party, conservatives on TV and (more importantly) talk radio are making the case that Trump captures the conservative spirit better than the other candidates in the race.
Rick Perry accuses Donald Trump of running a carnival barking act comprised of toxic demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense. This, my friends, is a classic case of when the
pot calls the kettle black.
Long suffering Texans have seen more than our fair share of barking political carnival acts, black pots and kettles, compliments of Rick Perry.