Focus on Scary Perry

The chances of Texas governor Rick Perry becoming front-runner for the Republican nomination to take on Barack Obama rose on Thursday after a lacklustre showing by other candidates in the biggest debate so far.

Perry's office confirmed on Thursday he is planning to announce that he will join the race on Saturday at a conservative conference in Charleston, South Carolina.

  UK Guardian

Now it’s Texas Governor Perry who’s going to unite the various Republican factions around a post-Reaganite, post-Bush conservative consensus. The only problem with that is Perry has aroused the ire of Texas conservatives, who noted the Governor’s Texas Transit Corridor highway project made liberal – if you’ll pardon the expression – use of eminent domain. The TTC proposal put him on the other side of the barricades from most Texas conservatives – and also put him at odds with Rep. Ron Paul, another fast-rising GOP presidential contender, who introduced legislation to block federal money for the scheme.

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Perry is being sold as the one candidate who can bridge the gap between the tea partiers and the old line "mainstream" Republican Establishment.

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[No one] can address the fiscal crisis at the core of our problems without facing the question of how to cut the misnamed "defense" budget. It soon became apparent to the tea partiers that a military tasked with policing the world – instead of actually defending this country – accounted for a good chunk of change.

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[Tea] party activists are pushing ahead with their campaign to cut back Big Government on all levels – including the international level. As The Hill reports, tea partiers are putting pressure on Republicans appointed to the "Super-Committee" to wield the budget knife unsparingly [on defense expenditures].

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As opposed to the traditional European conception of nationalism as warlike and expansionist, theirs is a distinctively American version that is inward looking and increasingly anti-imperialist.

  

Justin Raimondo

If you want to find the good in the Tea Party, there it is.

This is in radical juxtaposition to the views of Señor Perry, who has been characterized by one of his top aides as a "hawk internationalist." This is a good indication that the much-ballyhooed Perry bandwagon began going off the rails before it ever got started.

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[According] to Josh Rogin, over at Foreignpolicy.com, he’s been in meetings "sometimes for hours" with the likes of former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, former NSC "strategy guru" William Luti, and a host of other neocons from the last administration, many of whom were instrumental in lying us into war in Iraq. Feith and Luti were the nexus of a disinformation network which fed false "intelligence" to the Congress, the White House, and the public .

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Another clueless Texas Governor surrounded by the same Praetorian Guard of conniving neocons who led us down the road to imperial overstretch and fiscal ruin last time around – isn’t that just what the GOP needs right now?

And remember Molly Ivins' admonition: "Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention."

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.