New evidence of political fraudulence is emerging as more of the detailed record of Rhinestone Cowboy Rick Perry’s governorship hits the light of day.
Already exposed for shilling a phony jobs record and a doctored photo of Texas fiscal soundness, not to mention revealed for hosing up federal funds he decries as wasteful spending and oversized government when not propping up his sorry gubernatorial ass in Texas, Time magazine is reporting that long before he was siphoning stimulus funds, he was milking the federal budget for pork and gravy for his oil company cronies and himself.
Turns out that in 2003, during the period a Republican president and his Republican congress were running up the sort of monumental deficits they now find oh so very distressing, Rhinestone Rick sent his representatives to lobby the Republican congress for some of those taxpayer dollars he seeks to shrivel up unless they’re heading to Texas. According to the Texas Office of State-Federal Relations, Rick’s boys brought “$1.2 billion in temporary state fiscal relief to Texas.” Oh, the waste.
In 2005 Perry lobbied and received $200 million in federal money for his state’s No Child Left Behind program. The same lobbying effort, according to Time, rolled in “several earmarks, including direct funds for maintenance dredging in the Matagorda shipping channel, and money to study the feasibility of a desalination project in Freeport.” Standing on its own two feet in Texas? I think not.
In 2005, with Republicans still in control of Congress, members of the House of Representatives from Texas inserted into a gigantic energy bill $1.5 billion in pork for something called the, “Ultra-Deepwater and Unconventional Natural Gas and Other Petroleum Resources” project. Most of it ended up at the Texas Energy Center, a private Perry venture in Sugarland, Texas. Oh, that awful big government spending!
Later, and surely entirely coincidentally, the Texas Energy Center hired Drew Maloney, Chief of Staff for disgraced congressman Tom Delay, and the man responsible for squeezing the $1.5 billion out of congress. Of course Delay is another unctuous, anti-government humbug.
This two-faced number by Republican governors all across the country: burning down the soap boxes about the evils of spending and giant government, and the horror of the federal stimulus program, while knowing they themselves were shamelessly bleeding the American taxpayer for their own uses is now a Republican epidemic.
Republicans have reliably sold their message in the past whether on deficits or spending or the size of government, divorced from their actual records and their own actions, and done so quite successfully. It’s up to citizens, and unfortunately, to our milquetoast national media not to let them get away with it anymore. That’s probably wishing upon a rhinestone star.
They still have the death penalty in Texas I believe, and seem to relish the spectacle of executions. So I recommend this case of hypocrisy to prosecutors down in Austin as a capital crime, and urge a speedy trial, convicting Perry after the usual amount of Texan jury “deliberation.”
Update: Rhinestone Rick unleashed this whopper up in New Hampshire:
“I think we’re seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists that are coming forward and questioning the original idea that manmade global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”
Rather than just the usual Republican oil company toady, Rick gets Texas-size credit for being a personal butler to the CEO’s of the petroleum business. There’s something especially tawdry about a vocally self-identifying and self-promoting Christian, complicit in the needless destruction of the natural world, and in the exacerbation of health dangers to millions of Americans for nothing more than cravenly materialistic reasons.
Update:
In furtherance of his effort underway to eliminate himself from serious consideration for the nomination to be president of the United States in record time, Rhinestone Rick Perry today made one of the silliest proclamations in the history of American presidential politics, and perhaps in the annals of mental health by calling for the federal government to immediately cease enforcing all federal regulations. He said, unbelievably:
“We’re calling today on the president of the United States to put a moratorium on regulations across this country, because his regulations, his EPA regulations are killing jobs all across America. We’re sending out a request today asking President Obama to put a moratorium on all regulations.”
Posturing with simplistic bromides may be judged by Rick and his consultants to be a tried and true Republican strategy, and though substituting banal generalities for substance likewise has its record of success for Republican candidates, blurting out a call for such a sweeping and reckless government action as if simply ordering the Texas Department of Transportation to provide more toilet paper at Interstate rest stops, makes one at best appear to be a brainless attention hound and at worst plain crazy and scary.
In any case, the folks at thinkprogress listed all that would come to a halt were Rhinestone Rick’s proposal put into effect:
“Under such a moratorium, the Food and Drug Administration would stop approving new drugs and preventing human experimentation; the USDA would stop checking for food safety; the EPA would stop monitoring for poisons in drinking water; the Library of Congress would stop loaning materials to blind people; the NTSB would stop investigating airplane accidents; HHS would end Medicare payments; no more patents, copyrights, or trademarks would be issued; DHS would stop protecting chemical facilities from terrorist attacks; the Treasury would stop printing currency; financial sanctions on hostile nations like North Korea and Iran would end; and the Federal Reserve System would shut down. “
Scene Enough 