Showing posts with label Rick Perry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rick Perry. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Michele Bachmann goes viral. No, really.


If government injections are bad, does that mean private viruses are good?

Vaccinating young women against human papillomavirus, which causes cervical cancer, is somehow a violation of their "innocence," as Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann suggests in the above video from the CNN/Whack Job Tea Party Express debate for the GOP presidential field?

I know the social-conservative politics here -- the theory is that we're "slutproofing" teens, taking away a powerful disincentive to premarital sex and promiscuity. They believe that f***ing not only shouldn't be an entitlement, it also, in some form of Messing with Divine Wrath sense, shouldn't occur without the possibility of consequences.

Here's the transcript of the whole nutty exchange:

BLITZER: Gov. Perry, as you well know, you signed an executive order requiring little girls 11 and 12-year-old girls to get a vaccine to deal with a sexually transmitted disease that could lead to cervical cancer. Was that a mistake?

PERRY: It was. And indeed, if I had it to do over again, I would have done it differently. I would have gone to the legislature, worked with them. But what was driving me was, obviously, making a difference about young people's lives.

Cervical cancer is a horrible way to die. And I happen to think that what we were trying to do was to clearly send a message that we're going to give moms and dads the opportunity to make that decision with parental opt-out.

Parental rights are very important in state of Texas. We do it on a long list of vaccines that are made, but on that particular issue, I will tell you that I made a mistake by not going to the legislature first.

Let me address Ron Paul just a minute by saying I will use an executive order to get rid of as much of Obamacare as I can on day one.

(APPLAUSE)

BLITZER: Congresswoman Bachmann, do you have anything to say about what Governor Perry just said? You're a mom.

BACHMANN: I'm a mom. And I'm a mom of three children. And to have innocent little 12-year-old girls be forced to have a government injection through an executive order is just flat out wrong. That should never be done. It's a violation of a liberty interest.

That's -- little girls who have a negative reaction to this potentially dangerous drug don't get a mulligan. They don't get a do-over. The parents don't get a do-over. That's why I fought so hard in Washington, D.C., against President Obama and Obamacare.

President Obama in a stunning, shocking level of power now just recently told all private insurance companies, you must offer the morning-after abortion pill, because I said so. And it must be free of charge. That same level coming through executive orders and through government dictates is wrong. And that's why again we have to have someone who is absolutely committed to the repeal of Obamacare and I am. I won't rest until it's appealed.

BLITZER: Let's let Gov. Perry respond. Was what you signed into law, that vaccine for 11 and 12-year-old girls, was that, as some of your critics have suggested, a mandate?

PERRY: No, sir it wasn't. It was very clear. It had an opt-out. And at the end of the day, this was about trying to stop a cancer and giving the parental option to opt out of that. And at the end of the day, you may criticize me about the way that I went about it, but at the end of the day, I am always going to err on the side of life. And that's what this was really all about for me.

BLITZER: Sen. Santorum -- go ahead.

BACHMANN: Can I add to that, Wolf? Can I add to that?

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Hold on a second. First Congresswoman Bachmann, then Sen. Santorum.

BACHMANN: I just wanted to add that we cannot forget that in the midst of this executive order there is a big drug company that made millions of dollars because of this mandate. We can't deny that...

(APPLAUSE)

BLITZER: What are you suggesting?

BACHMANN: What I'm saying is that it's wrong for a drug company, because the governor's former chief of staff was the chief lobbyist for this drug company. The drug company gave thousands of dollars in political donations to the governor, and this is just flat-out wrong. The question is, is it about life, or was it about millions of dollars and potentially billions for a drug company?

BLITZER: All right. I'll let Sen. Santorum hold off for a second.

You've got to respond to that.

PERRY: Yes, sir. The company was Merck, and it was a $5,000 contribution that I had received from them. I raise about $30 million. And if you're saying that I can be bought for $5,000, I'm offended.

(APPLAUSE)

BACHMANN: Well, I'm offended for all the little girls and the parents that didn't have a choice. That's what I'm offended for.

(APPLAUSE)

SANTORUM: I think we need to hear what Gov. Perry's saying. He's saying that his policy was right. He believes that what he did was right. He thinks he went about it the wrong way.

I believe your policy is wrong. Why -- ladies and gentlemen, why do we inoculate people with vaccines in public schools? Because we're afraid of those diseases being communicable between people at school. And therefore, to protect the rest of the people at school, we have vaccinations to protect those children.

Unless Texas has a very progressive way of communicating diseases in their school by way of their curriculum, then there is no government purpose served for having little girls inoculated at the force and compulsion of the government. This is big government run amok. It is bad policy, and it should not have been done.

(APPLAUSE)

BLITZER: I'm going to move on, Gov. Perry, unless you want to say anything else.

PERRY: Look, I think we made decisions in Texas. We put a $3 billion effort in to find the cure for cancer. There are a lot of different cancers out there. Texas, I think, day in and day out, is a place that protects life.

I passed parental notification piece of legislation. I've been the most pro-life governor in the state of Texas. And what we were all about was trying to save young people's lives in Texas.

SANTORUM: Then give the parents the opt-in, as opposed to -- teach them, let them opt in, but do not force them to have this inoculation.
THERE ARE still plenty enough serious consequences to teen sex, if you ask me, without insisting upon a horrible death from cancer being among the "deterrents." At some point, you're not standing up for virtue and divine morality so much as you are being as mean as the devil.

Republicans like Bachmann and the equally loony yet somehow less entertaining Rick Santorum clearly have crossed that line.

Jesus God, I'm defending Rick Perry here! This is just one more ominous sign of the total insanity -- and unseriousness -- of a major political movement and of an entire political party.

I DON'T THINK "depraved" would be too strong a word for such a political culture.

If only someone could mandate inoculations against bat-s*** crazy, that might go a long way to fixing what's wrong with American politics.

Death: Love it. Live it. Cheer it.


The prospect of President Rick Perry scares me. The prospect of President Ron Paul, however faint, scares me more.

And the fact that, presumably, universal suffrage applies to a loud -- and monstrous -- contingent at Monday night's CNN/Tea Party Republican debate scares me most of all.

Let me be clear: If crowd reactions are any clue to what the tea-party movement really stands for (and I think they do, given the weirdness of America's present "tea" totalism), then this present darkness, this "constitutionalist" mass insanity not only threatens the American republic but also, if left unchecked, mortally threatens civilization itself.

It represents, in the ironic name of God and country, a mass restating of Cain's guilty query of the Lord:
"Am I my brother's keeper?" For Cain had just slain his brother, Abel.

Or let him die because he didn't buy health insurance. One or the other.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy


YOU KNOW
your political base is a bunch of hateful lunatics when the man who had been pandering to them so effectively admits to NBC News that he was horrified by the tea-bag rabble's heartless reaction.

The morning after a sometimes-rocky appearance in front of a Tea Party debate audience, Gov. Rick Perry said he was "taken aback" by cheers from some crowd members on a hypothetical question of whether a young man who decides not to buy health insurance should be refused care if he develops a life-threatening illness and be left to die.

"I was a bit taken aback by that myself," Perry told NBC News and the Miami Herald after appearing at a breakfast fundraiser in Tampa.

"We're the party of life. We ought to be coming up with ways to save lives."

Perry distinguished from that the issue of "justice," reiterating his strong support and "respect" for the death penalty on a state-by-state basis. "But the Republican party ought to be about life and protecting, particularly, innocent life," he added.

PERRY'S GOT it all wrong. His is not the party of life -- it is the Party of Greed. The Party of Self-Righteousness. The Party of Endless War. The Party of American Hubris. The Party of Demagoguery. The Party of Willful Ignorance. (How 'bout them drought- and heatwave-fueled Tejas wildfires, Governor? No climate change to see here . . . move along.)

And the Democrats are just as bad. Just different -- right-wing extremists cheer for letting the uninsured die of dread diseases, left-wing ones cheer for killing babies in the womb.

Our age has become one where shell-shocked Jeremiahs spend much time invoking, and desperately defending, moral propositions once so obvious they required little discussion and almost no debate. What are tea-party Republicans going to rethink next? The 13th Amendment?

What are "progressive" Democrats going to try to enshrine as a "right" next? Incest?

Don't answer that. Just allow me the small comfort of feeling vaguely foolish for having felt the need to write this flippin' post at all . . . for all the good it'll do.

Such is the state of the nation in this land far, far right (and left) of Eden.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

The seditionist in our midst


The presidential candidacy of Texas Gov. Rick Perry reminds one that the Alien and Sedition Acts were not 100-percent bad things.

The former Air Force pilot intimates that the president of the United States is less than patriotic -- and by extension 90 percent of Americans over 18 -- because he didn't volunteer for military service as a young man. And then he says that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, first appointed by President George W. Bush, would be doing something akin to treason by "printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history."

He added that they know how to handle the likes of quantitative easers in the Lone Star Republic: “I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.”


I WONDER whether Texas jurisprudence for an "almost treacherous — or treasonous" Fed head would include yelling "Christ-killer" at the Jewish "moneychanger" while the mob . . . er, justice committee strung him up.

If Rick Perry exemplifies what passes for electoral politics in Texas, perhaps secession isn't such a bad idea, after all. Maybe Texas should secede sooner and not later.

In fact, maybe Texas ought not let the door hit it in the ass on the way out of the Union.

And maybe President Obama ought to give Bernanke the honor of pulling the trigger on the Hellfire missile when just another traitor -- albeit a high-value treasonous target on America's southern flank -- gets his.

Because the "ugly" you sow is the ugly you damn well ought to reap.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Heil myself!


If you're a Republican governor of Texas who likes to speak coyly of secession and loudly about enemies of the people, and if you like to have great big rallies featuring eccentric preachers, and if you figure it might be fun to run for president . . . don't do this.

Especially in front of the photographers.



Or this.


And for God's sake, don't do this.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

President of where?


So, of which country does Rick Perry want to be president? Tejas or los Estados Unidos?

The present gobernador de Tejas hasn't exactly been clear in his documented remarks on the subject, according to
The Texas Tribune (La Tribuna de Tejas):
“He has said many times that we have a great union, and he believes it should stay that way,” Miner said. Miner reviewed the YouTube clip and said it was clear Perry was speaking to people in his office but that he could not “verify the audio or the video that was put together.”

However, well-known tech blogger Robert Scoble told The Texas Tribune on Tuesday that he remembers the meeting with Perry in the governor’s office in 2009. It's clear from interviews, blogs and Twitter postings that the remarks were recorded nearly a month before the April Tea Party gathering, which helped launch Perry’s successful 2010 re-election effort.

In the meeting, Perry can be heard speaking to the group of tech bloggers about the founding of Texas in 1836. A slideshow shows Perry pointing to a painting of the dramatic fall of the Alamo, artifacts in his office and the “Come and Take It” logo on his own boots.

Texans have a “different feeling about independence,” Perry told the group.

“When we came into the nation in 1845, we were a republic, we were a stand-alone nation,” the governor can be heard saying. “And one of the deals was, we can leave anytime we want. So we’re kind of thinking about that again.”



JUST WHAT we need -- another damn Texan as president, this time one who'd turn America into a bigger, meaner manifestation of the feuding Big 12 Conference . . . which has dwindled to 10 schools and counting down toward oblivion.

Tell you what. If Perry were to become president
(in which case we could be absolutely sure divine judgment was upon us), we in the northern Plains states might just secede and hook up with Canada.

Just us and a great big chunk of the formerly United States' nuclear deterrent.