Rick Perry
“I don't believe government should espouse a specific faith, least of all atheism. Can I git an 'amen'?”
James Richard "Rick" Perry (born March 4, 1950) was a long-running Governor of the U.S. state of Texas, and a short-running Republican Party candidate for the 2012 and 2016 nominations for President. His service of 14 years and 1 month makes him the longest-serving Texas Governor in history, while his service of 0 years and 0 months ties him for the shortest-serving U.S. President.
Perry was one of the notorious "Seven Dwarfs" in the 2012 campaign. In astronomy terms, while Jon Huntsman was the Red Dwarf, Perry was a sort of Gas Giant. Perry's campaign focused on closing three departments of the federal government. He is remembered for forgetting which three departments those might be.
Perry also sought the Republican nomination in 2016, with the slogan, "Don't worry, I made a list this time." He "won by losing," as the victorious Donald Trump made Perry his nominee for that Cabinet-level department whose name he forgot. He made a fine Secretary — though, when he got off the plane to Washington, D.C., he could not remember why he went.
Early life
Perry is from Paint Creek in Haskell County, Texas, mere miles down the road from Snake's Hips. His family has been Texans since before the Texas Revolution and Americans since before the American Revolution. Perry has been a Republican since his personal revolution against the Democratic Party, which first elected him to office. Perry has said that he has been interested in holding office ever since 1961, when his father took him to the funeral of Rep. Sam Rayburn and he realized that Texas seats do free up perhaps every other generation.
At Texas A&M, Perry was a frat boy and "yell leader" — both serving as perfect preparation for life at the State Capitol. He graduated in 1972 with a Bachelor's in Animal Science with concentration in bachelor science, including the physics of rubber devices. After brief stints as a door-to-door book salesman, a target-to-target Air Force bomber pilot, and a boll-to-boll cotton farmer, Perry sought elective office — a full-circle return to door-to-door.
In 1984, Perry was elected as a Democrat to the Texas House of Representatives. Wikipedia reports that Perry was befriended by a left-wing moonbat, supported tax increases, and did other things for which Republicans should now hate him. In 1988, Perry supported the campaign of Al Gore in an unspecified manner, probably barfing.
Higher office in lower Texas
The next year, Perry announced he was now a Republican. This either had something to do with increasing familiarity with Gore, or the fact that the person holding the next office up was a fellow Democrat whom he now needed to un-fellow.
That fellow was Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower. Agriculture Commisioner may sound like a minor post, but in Texas, it is as big as Mosquito Commissioner is in Michigan. The Commissioner has responsibility for attaching seals to gas pumps and supermarket granola dispensers, resulting in thousands of opportunities to take bribes. Availing himself of the expert advice of Karl Rove and a chance investigation of Hightower by the FBI, Perry became the new Commissioner.
Perry expressed support for Hillary Clinton's 1993 plan for health care in her husband Bill's administration. Perry would later explain that, as Agriculture Commissioner, he only supported Hillary's single-payer approach as a solution to give Affordable Care to livestock and produce, not people.
In 1998, Perry weighed a third term calibrating cattle scales, but ditched Rove and ran a successful campaign for Lieutenant Governor. His Governor was none other than George W. Bush, who showed Perry "how it's done." Perry began to sound like Bush, though this had ceased to be a career enhancer by around 2008.
Governor of Texas
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Biased Wiki Warning |
| This section fails to cover several promising Perry scandals as Governor of Texas. There may be additional information on the talk page. Hmm, I guess there isn't. Editors are reminded that it does no good having an "encyclopedia anyone can edit" if a Republican gets out alive. |
In late 2000, Bush resigned as Governor on the lame excuse that the nation, God help it, had elected him U.S. President. Perry assumed the office of Governor of Texas. Perry would win the office in his own right in 2002 and 2006, though in 2010 he instead won re-election in the right of Harambe the Killer Ape.
Perry governed as a fiscal conservative, often promising not to raise taxes, except for a few small ones, at least not while bankers continued to step up to buy state debt to pay welfare checks and kickbacks to small businesses. Perry received grades of B in 2004, B in 2006, B in 2008, B in 2010, C in 2012, and B in 2014 from the Cato Institute, even while continuing to Party Like It's 1999. This beat his grades from A&M, and also beat any brainstorm his brother Dubya might have had in the White House during the same stretch.
It is said that "only Nixon could go to China," and likewise only a "conservative" could get away with some of Perry's initiatives in Texas. These include the following:
- Perry issued an executive order for all Texas schoolgirls to get the HPV vaccine. He explained to Texas ranchers, "I know your pre-teen is going to fuck around, and the State ought to protect her from this unsightly disease when she does." The ranchers conceded that their young daughters were all sluts and thanked Perry for his willingness to point it out. However, Perry's order would become problematic during his Presidential campaign, when competitor Michele Bachmann claimed her pastor said vaccines cause autism. The order was overruled by the legislature.
- Perry declared that he thought abortions were permissible "in the case of the mother's health," or when there is a big dance coming up and Mom needs to fit into that special dress.
- Perry campaigned against wasteful malpractice lawsuits and pre-natal care. He claims that Texas is first or maybe second in the nation for quality of health care. However, independent experts contacted at Democratic Party Headquarters state that Perry's moves did not solve all the state's health problems and probably put a lot of loot in his own pocket.
- Perry allowed border-jumpers from Mexico to send their children to Texas universities using the discount for Texas "residents." As always, the parents have to promise to do things right from here on out, unless inconvenient for them, and no one is checking, in any case. Perry also advocated the Trans Texas Corridor, a superhighway to facilitate international commerce and immigration. Perry's plan would have resulted in the first Texas expressway with no exits in Texas.
Thankfully, there are many reasons for the left-wing to hate Perry as well. Perry has stated that the Bible is the infallible word of God. This may be a no-brainer for a Texas politician, but it is also a no-brainer to turn every campaign into a debate on religious doctrine and school curriculum. Perry began attending an evangelical mega-church just outside Austin, not only because it was convenient to the Capitol but because it had no fewer than 15 spare TV cameras that were trained on him during services.
Cameo appearance on the national stage
Perry has repeatedly denied interest in higher office. He loudly refused suggestions that he might be the Vice President of John McCain, jumping off that train well before the crash. Nevertheless, in August 2011, Perry entered the race for the Republican Party nomination for U.S. President. The 2012 campaign was one in which each candidate became the "front-runner" for a couple of weeks. Perry got his chance to take the lead at the very outset, in August 2011 — which simple arithmetic shows is about one year too soon.
The musical chairs commenced when the Washington Post developed fateful scandals on each candidate. In the case of Perry, it was that his family leased a hunting camp containing a rock containing the word "Nigger," and at no time did Perry stop other family members from hunting and demand that they paint over the hurtful word, though they finally did anyway. The national networks pursued for weeks its theme of "What did Governor Perry know, and when did he know it?" Many a roadrunner and grouse escaped the shotgun only to be traumatized by the hate speech on that rock.
That episode slowed down the Perry freight train, but what derailed it was his own debate performance in November 2011. He stated that, as President, he would shut down three Cabinet-level agencies but, when pressed, he could remember the names of only two. He continued to draw a blank until Ron Paul shouted out several agencies for Perry to offer to kill. The Perry campaign pointed out that shutting down any three Cabinet agencies would be a vast improvement — but the Perry campaign was over.
Incidentally, the Cabinet agency whose name Perry could not remember was the Department of Pain Pills. America would instead endure four more years of a President who had written about his fondness for cocaine.
Rehabilitation and re-destruction
There is no more constant principle in American politics than that a discredited candidate can always be re-credited if the Party has an empty spot on the ballot. Thus, as the Republican Governor completed his rehabilitation from surgery, Democrats called out for someone to stick the scalpel back in.
The opportunity came when Democratic Austin District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg mistook a bicycle path for State Highway .239, when in fact that was her blood alcohol level. The Governor, not seeing how Lehmberg could commute to work after the judge pulled her driver's license, threatened to veto her entire $7.5 million office budget unless the office continued and she did not. To Democrats, this sudden advocacy of sobriety was blackmail. They envisioned placing the Governor in a double cell with Tom DeLay, who had likewise been charged with misusing power (in DeLay's case, the power to draw election districts) to the detriment of Democrats.
The court ruled that threatening to zero-fund a government department was Perry's right under the Freedom of Speech, just like zero-funding that federal department whose name had left him Speechless. Perry was a free man — but, alas, a political pariah, as the 2016 Presidential campaign washed its hands of a man accused of a felony in hopes of nominating a squeaky-clean and scandal-proof candidate — and wound up with Donald Trump.
Secretary of Energy
Perry and other conservatives busied themselves in 2016 trying to unite around a single candidate to keep the Republican Party from nominating Jeb Bush. That was Ted Cruz — but his campaign seized up in May 2016 and conservatives scrambled to keep the nation from not caring what the Republican Party did at all. Perry endorsed Trump, as did most other conservatives. Those who did not are now writers for National Review.
Following Trump's astonishing victory, he began nominating to run each Cabinet agency the person who most hated it. He made an exception at the Department of Energy, however, nominating Perry, who could not remember how he felt about it.
The nomination brought an entirely new set of challenges, such as convincing 106,000 workers to stop playing World of Warcraft and go back to their projects the boss doesn't want done. So Perry testified before the Senate that neither his remarks in 2011, nor his inability to remember which department he was remarking about, "reflect my current thinking." Yes, he now remembered the department, and merely forgot his promise to blow it up.
He assured the Democrats that the Department would redouble its efforts to promote the sex change community and fight sack lunches in the workplace. Faced with several Executive Orders from Trump to reduce regulation (or at least the count of them), Perry delivered no budget reduction and no deregulation, focusing instead on stopping the agency from nagging Americans to use wind and solar and getting back to nagging them to use oil and gas. He replaced Obama-era subsidies based on renewability with subsidies based on blackness and greasiness. His crowning achievement was having the Department of Energy rename methane as "Freedom Gas" in a campaign that touted the "sweet smell of freedom."
See also
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