It’s hard to imagine who would be a worse governor, incumbent Republican Rick Perry or Republican challenger U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. Unless, gosh darn it, your name is Sarah Palin, you live 2,500 miles away, and can see Russia from Alaska, and therefore you have no problem taking a long-distance gander at Texas politics to help us make the right choice. (Not that she’s for choice: Any allegiance Palin feels toward her gender is dwarfed by her love of tax cuts and her belief that a woman should not have the right to choose what to do with an unwanted pregnancy.)
Hutchison, who will oppose Perry in the GOP primary in 2010, couldn’t have wished for a better gift than that endorsement. Who says there’s no Easter Bunny? Palin, her 15 minutes of fame over, is doing her best to keep her perky profile before the voters; she handed down her endorsement last week via a letter addressed to Texas Republican women. Since there were no foreign countries involved and she didn’t have to decide whether Farmers Branch was its own continent, Palin appears to have written the letter herself.
“While a bunch of politicians have gone to Washington, hat in hand, seeking a bailout, Gov. Perry has said we should stimulate the economy with tax cuts and maintain spending discipline,” she wrote. Right – his tax cuts are why so many Texas agencies are mere cardboard facades, unable to regulate/protect/maintain/ or investigate as they’re supposed to do … and why Texas is standing in line with all the other states to get its fair share of the economic stimulus package.
Perry, she wrote, “walks the walk of a true conservative. And he sticks to his guns – and you know how I feel about guns!” Who needs a straight man with Palin writing the copy? Perry has always seemed to many Texans to walk whichever way wouldn’t blow his hair back in his face. And guns, of course, are what Texas has never had enough of, no matter how many people get killed by them every year.
She also talked about how Perry has advocated “greater domestic drilling for energy,” a topic near and dear to Barnett Shale hearts, of course. If only she’d said drilling “with virtually no government oversight or regulation,” which is what the state has provided under Perry’s leadership. But it was the end of that sentence that was Static’s favorite part of the whole letter, where she said that Perry’s advocacy of drilling and other energy development is important “so America is not held hostage by Middle East ayatollahs and foreign dictators.”
Well, shucks, we have to take back the part about her not needing any foreign experience in order to endorse Perry. The last time we looked, there were none of the Shiite religious leaders in positions of power in Canada, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela, or Nigeria – the top five recent foreign sources of the oil America imports. And what about Americans being held hostage by the homegrown dictators of ExxonMobil Corp., which last month broke its own record by reporting profits of $45.2 billion for 2008, part of which went to fund global-warming-denial groups?
Enough fun for one day. Static will now go back to trolling through its e-mail, just for the scary thrill of reading the subject line of the messages from the “2012 Draft Sarah Committee.” That’s scarier than Tom Hicks trying to buy a newspaper (last week’s thrill-chill, delivered online via the Weekly’s blog).
