Derry, Northern Ireland

Derry, Northern Ireland
A book I'm working on is set in this town.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Governor Good Hair Does It Again

Can't really formulate a thought of my own, right now, so I'm just repeating an aritcle from the "New York Times." It's too damned funny what passes for intelligent reporting, these days. (See the bit near the end about buying foreign oil -- emphasis added.)
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December 28, 2011, 8:29 am
What Moves Republican Crowds in Iowa
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

DES MOINES — The Republican candidates for president are doing a lot of talking in the last week before voting begins.

On Tuesday, Rick Perry held four events, starting in Council Bluffs and ending up in Osceola, about an hour south of Des Moines. Mr. Perry talked about being an outsider, taking the fight to President Obama and making the Congress a part-time legislature.

But the audiences in all four places were remarkably similar when it came to what parts of Mr. Perry’s speech moved them to applause, sometimes even hooting and hollering their approval when Mr. Perry touched on issues they care about.

Some of the applause was clearly for Mr. Perry, whose stump speech includes some well-delivered lines that are designed to get a reaction. But some of those lines fell flat on Tuesday, while the audience — not necessarily filled with supporters of Mr. Perry — sometimes applauded when the candidate least expected it.

Here are the main subjects that met with approval from the several hundred Iowa voters who gathered to hear Mr. Perry across the state on Tuesday. The reactions provide a rough sense of the kinds of things that Iowa voters may be thinking about when they arrive at their caucus location next week.

Israel: At every stop, Mr. Perry took a roundabout shot at Ron Paul for saying during a debate that he was not that concerned about the prospect of Iran getting a nuclear weapon.

“You don’t have to vote for a candidate who would allow Iran to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth and ultimately America,” Mr. Perry said in Council Bluffs. At every stop, the comment drew loud applause.

The issue of Israel’s security has always been a big one for Republicans. But the intensity of the reaction to Mr. Perry’s comment suggests that Iowa voters may now be more keenly aware of the situation in that country, and more willing to make it part of their calculation on voting day.

The Size of Government: No big surprise: the Republican audiences around Iowa appear to want a smaller, more efficient federal government. But the reaction from the crowd to Mr. Perry’s view on the subject was revealing.

“I believe that the federal government should do a few things, do those few things real well, and get out of the way and leave Americans alone,” Mr. Perry said at one stop on Tuesday. The crowd reacted before he could finish with loud applause and shouts of “yeah!”

A few minutes later, Mr. Perry said his purpose in the race is “to make Washington D.C. as inconsequential in your life as I can make it.” And in Clarinda later in the afternoon, Mr. Perry repeated his desire to have “a part time Congress,” saying, “Cut their pay in half, cut their time in half, cut their staff in half.”

The promises drew loud applause from all of Mr. Perry’s crowds, suggesting that they agree with his assessment about the size and scope of government, even if they are not necessarily supporting his candidacy.

Immigration: The issue of immigration became an intense subject among Iowans in 2008, when Senator John McCain initially backed a comprehensive immigration reform bill that was despised by rank-and-file conservatives in Iowa and across the country.

That intensity seems not to have died out. At each of Mr. Perry’s stops the audiences roared their approval at the candidate’s pledge to shut the border down if he is elected president.

“There is no such thing as homeland security until there is border security,” Mr. Perry said to a round of applause in Council Bluffs. “We will secure that border, we will shut it down within one year of my inauguration.”

He repeated the promise — and got a similarly enthusiastic response — in Creston. “Within a year of taking my hand off the Bible, you can bet on one thing, that border will be shut down and it will be secured,” he said.

Abortion: Mr. Perry did not focus much on social issues in his stump speeches, preferring to cast himself instead as the ultimate Washington outsider (a line that got treated with stone silence at all of the events on Tuesday). But the crowds were not silent when he mentioned the subject of abortion.

“I am a social conservative who has defended traditional marriage and protected the unborn children, including signing a budget that defunded Planned Parenthood, and they closed down 12 of their abortion clinics,” Mr. Perry said in Osceola.

The enthusiastic response to Mr. Perry’s discussion of the abortion topic provides a bit of anecdotal evidence for the presumption that social and religious conservatives may make a strong showing at the caucuses.

Energy: The audiences at Mr. Perry’s events seemed somewhat unmoved by parts of his speech that talked about job creation. But when it came to energy and oil, they perked up.

“Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don’t have to buy from a foreign source,” Mr. Perry said in Clarinda, earning a loud round of enthusiastic applause.**

Later, the audience reacted again to Mr. Perry’s assertion that buying so much energy from foreign countries is “not good policy, it’s not good politics and frankly it’s un-American.”


Balanced Budget: Iowa voters are hearing a lot about the economy from the Republican candidates, and a lot of it sounds similar. But at Mr. Perry’s events, they seemed to really appreciate his promise to push for a balanced budget amendment.

“I will travel all across this country, if that’s what’s required, to be the head yell-leader on this issue,” Mr. Perry said in Osceola. “I’ll go all across this country promoting passing a balanced budget amendment to the constitution.”

The issue got plenty of applause from the audience.
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**Apparently even Mr. Shear was unaware that Canada is a foreign nation, hence his lack of comment about that absurd sentence. It's part of the Commonwealth of Nations, like Australia and India and 52 other countries, and has universal health care (called Medicare!), one of them anti-American, European-style, government intrusions into the free market. In fact, there's been no comment from anyone outside the liberal blogosphere about Perry's latest idiocy. Some liberal media this is.

No wonder the electorate is more stupid than not.

2 comments:

Writer said...

Oh WHY oh WHY, did Molly Ivins have to die? She'd be having such a good time at the moment. :/

JamTheCat said...

That or she'd be hitting the bottle because there's too much reality that's vying with her satire for satirical truth.

You couldn't make Rick Perry up; nobody'd believe him in a work of fiction.