Shameful. That’s really the only way to describe Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s hyperbolic rhetoric in Dallas yesterday, when he used faith as a weapon to divide Texans in this election year. Gov. Perry was speaking at an event hosted by the far-right Texas Eagle Forum on the eve of the Texas Republican Party convention in the same city.
Gov. Perry “painted the upcoming election as a religious crusade to take back the soul of the country,” the Dallas Morning News reported:
“We will raise our voices in defense of our values and in defiance of the hollow precepts and shameful self-interests that guide our opponents on the left,” Perry said to the receptive audience.
He said the November election is bigger than “red states and blue states, conservatives or liberals, stimulus or budget cuts.”
“We are in a struggle for the heart and soul of our nation,” Perry said.
“That’s the question: Who do you worship? Do you believe in the primacy of unrestrained federal government? Or do you worship the God of the universe, placing our trust in him?”
Excuse us? That’s the choice? If people don’t worship God then they must worship “the primacy of unrestrained federal government” instead? It’s hard to imagine a more cynical and arrogant attack on the faith of people who don’t share Gov. Perry’s political views.
Which office does Rick Perry think he holds, that of governor or pope? While he decides, perhaps he will do Texans a favor and refrain from divisive “for us or against us” rhetoric when it comes to matters of faith.
SFB (S*** For Brains) seems to run in the governorship of this idiotic state. His predecessor once had a “Jesus Day” in Texas, thus eliminating all religions who do not believe that Jesus was who he thinks he was.
Maybe a frontal lobotomy might help the governor? Texas once again is turning into a laughing stock. Methinks that we need to impeach the jerk before it is too late.
Yes, he is pretty damn stupid. However, he’s calculating that with the economy slowly limping back into the plus column, (without his help in the least, by the way), and the confusion and disillusionment in the less rabid folks on the center right due to things like the BP spill, etc, he’d better gin up the frothing at the mouth Christian State wingnuts.
Bill White will slowly but surely turn the newspaper editorial boards and the serious forward looking business community over to his side, and he’ll eventually start gaining traction on this caricature of a cartoon hero.
@David: “caricature of a cartoon hero” maybe, but don’t forget the GOOD HAIR!
As I was taught in freshman English at Baylor University, the proper question is “whom do you worship”? But, what can you expect from a Governor who fails to understand that it is the whole subject of “religion” (First Amendment) about which Congress shall make no law even “respecting,” not just a church. Of course, the same First Amendment now also applies to states, thanks to the Fourteenth Amendment, as ruled by the Supreme Court.
While off-topic, I thought we could use a little laugh courtesy of the Dallas Morning News blog on the Big XII breakup http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/061110dnspocowlishaw_hp.9184c10e.html
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2. Anything that wakes up the Texas Legislature is usually a bad thing. How exactly could Texas state senators tell the Pac-10 that they had to take Baylor and not Colorado?
But then, who knows? In a state where decisions on how we teach history to our kids are made by frustrated dentists, I guess anything goes.
What kind of idiot “worships” government?
Well, I have often wondered where I was on that spectrum. I guess its official, I worship unrestrained federal government. Like so many before me, Alexander Hamilton to name but one. But this is the choice?? If this is the choice, given the list of things that have just occurred on the Texas State Board of Education, the federal government NEEDS to intervene just so Texas won’t ruin the curve for everyone. I am astounded that intelligent beings will choose to be stupid. If history doesn’t agree with them, they rewrite it. If evolution is disagreeable to you, then we will change the parameters of science. This is the same old game, keep changing the gold post. The problem is that history, like science, is a bit more fixed than just rewriting it and running a new public relations campaign. And now, these new “standards”, or lack thereof, have just placed the Texas Public Schools on the bottom of the list. Any student who wants to go to college out of the state, and they will, will now be at a disadvantage to his or her peers who graduated elsewhere. It is because of these “culture” wars and reluctance to “change our way of life” that a free people remain uneducated, ignorant, and stupid. I appears that now they want to spread the stupidity throughout Texas. It is one thing to WANT to be stupid; it’s quite another to indoctrinate a whole generation in a form of education that does not address all the aspects that are necessary. It is tragic. I think when I retire I will become a dentist.
Alexander Hamilton was right.
So far, the federal government has not intruded into my personal life or the life of my family in a way that I did not like. In fact, back in the 1960s, it quite probably saved my life because of a program to provide reduced-price medication to children in poor families. It also helped me go to college when I would have otherwise been unable to do so because my dad made only minimum wage at his job—all his work life.
Because I did have a rare opportunity to go to college on someone else’s dime, I did not waste it. I had a straight A+ overall average on my course work in college, later got really good high-paying jobs, and paid in scads more federal, state, and local taxes than the total money I ever got out of the federal government. In fact, I felt (and still feel) privileged and honored at an opportunity to pay taxes. Why? Well, I use the public library and rather like the potholes filled on my local highways at the end of winter. In addition, if my tax dollars will help another poor kid who needs medicine or a college education, I consider that just wonderful. No, let me qualify that, it feels “just” and “wonderful.”
Of course, now some conservative whack job is going to show up here and complain to high heaven that no government should have paid for a big part of my college education. After all, he had to shell out $40,000 a year to send his kid to college, and no government was helping him. That’s just not fair. But don’t worry. Like I said, all of my debts to Uncle Sam were paid off with tremendous interest. You didn’t lose a dime on me, but you may be losing a dime on your own child.
I remember the sons and daughters of the middle class and upper class Democrats and Republicans that I lived with in the dorms. Although there were notable exceptions (there always are), it appeared to me that a very large number of these privileged kids did not appreciate the educations their moms’s and dad’s were paying for out of pocket. While I was up studying late and using your tax dollars to best effect, your children were the ones sponsoring “casino night” in the dorm, stealing bicycles at nearby universities, defrauding insurance companies to send girls to Canada for abortions, laying around the dorm in a drunken stupor all weekend—nearly every weekend, and waiting until the last minute to study for an exam or write a paper to keep up their 2.1 GPA. I witnessed all of this first hand, and it was rampant back in the 1970s. So, I ask the question. Whose money was being wasted? Moreover, if you are now paying that $40,000 per year out of pocket, where is your son or daughter tonight at college? Are they studying to give you some return on that money, or are they laying around the dorm drunk all weekend and doing some drugs on the side? Oh, you say, not my daughter. She has always been a good kid. Right. The problem is—so were the one’s who lived with me in the dorm.
Why don’t you take a drive over to the college tonight and see how your son is really spending that $40,000. When you find out, just be aware that there is a kid down the hall on federal financial aid. He is studying and making the best of that money because he sees it as his only opportunity to escape the squalid life he had at home.
Just think about it, before the rise of the goldang federal government, anyone could be a dentist. All you had to do was put out a shingle with the painting of a tooth on it. Anyone in pain enough to let a total strange pull their teeth was a customer.
Then someone came up with the idea of the “painless dentist”, which gave rise to several generations of opium addicts.
Then the goldang federal government came up with all these bleeding heart liberal ideas about dentistry, and you have to have a damn license, and you have a code of conduct and all that other dang federal regulation strangling free trade, and the whole dang country’s gone soft with the nanny state, the mommy state, and the dang wetnurse state.
Conservatism. It’s time we turned the clock back.
And toilet paper, that’s another one of those goldang modern newfangled fancypants indulgences we could do without.
Rick Perry makes a lot of sense.
As I was taught in my year at law school, the Constitution is the “supreme law of the land,” regardless of what anyone thinks, and it has supreme authority in a court of law. Like it or not, it is the Constitution which controls the essence of government, and, regardless of the ignorance of some on the Texas State Board of Education, in the USA, “religion” (First Amendment) shall not be established by law or government at any level. It is unfortunate TFN was not able to win the debate with our opponents on that clearly stated constitutional and governmental principle, mainly, in my opinion, because TFN remains stubbornly addicted to the words “church and state,” which words do not exist in the Constitution, and which argument our opponents easily used in rebuttal. In any debate, words do matter, and in a constitutional debate the exact words of the Constitution do matter. It is the whole subject of “religion” which shall not be established by law or government. The Founding Fathers and the First Congress got the wording correct from the beginning. It is past time for TFN to do the same and correctly term the debate, as I, shamelessly, do in my book, The Religion Commandments in the Constitution: A Primer.
David. When Rick Perry talks, toilet paper makes a lot of sense.
I meant to say “total stranger”, but given that we’re talking about Rick Perry, I think “total strange” has just become a noun.
In time, it will be verbed, of course.
“Total strange” also works for another certain dentist who just got voted off the totally strange SBOE.
Excellent parody of Perry, David. Another neologism might become Perrydy: a totally strange making fun of asaninity using examples of real-life Perry.
Speaking of the extreme right, I took the kids out to play tennis this afternoon, and we ended up at Books-A-Million. While I was there, I noticed a book entitled “Losing our Religion” by some woman by the name of S.E. Cupp. She is supposedly a conservative atheist, and the purpose of her book is to show that the “liberal left wing news media” in the United States really does hate conservative Christians. Not being prone to spend my money on trash, I sat down with it and gave it a good perusal.
Total trash. Even if you collect books written by the extreme right for the purpose of knowing your opponent before going into battle, I doubt this one would be worth the money. Best I could tell, it was written rather simplistically like newspaper text, which many of you know is written with an 8th grade education in mind. The book was obviously written to get the word out to the uneducated faithful and to reinforce all of their preconceived prejudices.
Cathie Adams Smackdown!
Can’t wait to read TFN’s coverage of what looks to me like a big FU to Adams, except it appears to have been orchestrated by Debra Medina. Go figure!
Nonetheless, what Governor Perry said is the essence of our debate with the right wing radical Republican theocrats, “we are in a struggle for the heart and soul of our nation.” We are struggling against religionists who want to destroy the heart and soul of our nation: “no religious test” (Art. 6) and no law respecting an establishment of “religion” (First Amendment). It is way past time to stand up for what the Constitution commands, in more ways than one, for example, the following TFN discussion may be of interest: http://tfn.org/2010/06/17/the-lie-that-wont-die/#comments .