Does anybody else find it ironic that Perry is faltering because of the rare good deeds that he has done, such as the Dream Act and the HPV mandate? The guy spends ten years being a total hardline conservative with a couple of exceptions, and suddenly his own party is turning against him. I find it especially ironic that Perry is accusing his rivals of not having a heart when he has assented to booting who-knows-how-many-hundreds-of-thousands of families off CHIP and Medicaid (in the latter case, by requiring them to re-up every six months, knowing that some would fail to do it and fall off the rolls for half a year). He brags about securing the border, lavishes hundreds of millions of dollars in homeland security funding on border sheriffs in return for their political support, has put up border cameras all over the place in South Texas, may even have some drones flying around down there, but because he scoffs at the effectiveness of a wall, Republicans think he wants to invite every Mexican north of Mexico City to emigrate. The tea party is mad that he won’t call a special session to pass a sanctuary cities bill; let’s hope they don’t find out that the DPS doesn’t enforce immigration laws, nor should it. Even his controversial HPV executive order was a good deed, if somewhat dubiously motivated. It was the wackos in his party that opposed it. I didn’t think that Perry’s conservative-Democratic past and Al Gore flirtation would be a problem for him, but somehow, the old conservative Democrat in him keeps bubbling up to the surface. The more he sounds like a Democrat, accusing people of having no heart, the more that real conservatives are going to wonder about him. Now he is being squeezed between his intention to court Latino votes in swing states and the extreme nativist views of the tea party: yet more irony, because it was Perry who drove the Texas Republican party farther and farther to the right over the past decade, until it ended up in the arms of the tea party. (At one rally, he said something along the lines of, “They call you right wing extremists, and if you are, then I’m for you. “) Perry needs to stop trying to be a good guy. He’s at his best when he’s mean and heartless.
Blood and irony
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