Rick Perry Bends Texas Over One More Time

Hopefully his run at the Republican nomination will finally be the last flipping straw and the folks in Texas will finally get themselves a new guv after having been publicly screwed by this guy umpteen times over.  It won’t be long before the rest of us can look back fondly and say, “Rick who?”, but I have a feeling that Texans are going to be paying the costs of ever electing this ignorant clod in the first place for a long time to come.

We’re talking about the only guy we’ve ever heard of who managed to start drawing his retirement without having to… you know… retire first, who lives in a goddamned $10k a month palace at taxpayer expense because the governor’s mansion got a booboo, the man who continued to draw his state salary for months while he spent 24/7 out actively seeking a new job.  I’m guessing that a serious audit of this man’s rein over the Texas treasury would turn up a multitude of lesser known ways in which he’s nickeled and dimed state taxpayers out of millions but there he is, still ensconced in the ten thousand dollar palace, dispensing his particular form of “governance” to the highest bidders for so much a pop.

Behind that carefully polished J.R. Ewing facade, that painstakingly honed and sharpened to the point of caricature version of the picture most non-Texans have of the “typical” Texas cowboy type, there dwells the mind of a grifter, so finely tuned to making a buck that short of stealing from the church collection (at least during an election campaign) there’s little to nothing he wouldn’t do to secure and advance his position as one of the 1%.  Whenever I see or hear Rick Perry’s name mentioned, the picture that pops into my head is not one of Perry himself but one of Burt Lancaster in “Elmer Gantry”, a movie much older than the average reader here and an allusion many won’t get.

One of the taglines from the movie was “If there was a dollar to be made – Gantry would make it… If there was a soul to be saved – Gantry would save it” which to me… given his shameless pandering and appeals to the holy roller right… pretty much describes Perry’s performance in his (thankfully) recently ended campaign for the Republican nomination which… as we are about to see… continues to cost Texas taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Chuck Lindell @ the Austin American/Statesman: Perry presidential security cost taxpayers $800,000

Texas taxpayers were billed almost $800,000 in travel costs for a security detail to travel with Gov. Rick Perry largely on out-of-state events tied to his presidential campaign from September through November, state figures show.Most of Perry’s 48 out-of-state destinations were to the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, according to a report released late Thursday by the Texas Department of Public Safety, which provides security when Perry and his wife, Anita, travel.

For security reasons, DPS does not reveal how many troopers accompany the governor or how far in advance they arrive at Perry’s destination.

The DPS report listed only broad categories of expenses for airfare, food, lodging, fuel and other expenses.

A September trip to South Carolina, Iowa and back to South Carolina, for example, led to $45,122 in payments, including $10,834 for hotels and $7,526 for food, for the executive protection detail, the report showed.

Including security for six in-state trips, travel costs for Perry’s security detail totaled $798,031 in the state’s first fiscal quarter, which began in September.

And that’s just for what?  Three months of job hunting?

More at the link but honest Texans, #1) there is nothing about this man that makes him worth spending almost a million bucks of your money to keep someone from popping him while he interviewed for a new job, especially since #2) there was never any chance that he was going to get the job he was interviewing for, which might conceivably have made assassination a legitimate concern.

Hopefully, Texans will be able to do the rest of the country a favor and kiss this motherhumper goodbye once and for all.  He needs to be encouraged not to run again and if his ego pushes him to run anyway he needs to be primaried and roundly and soundly defeated, consigned to the same compost heap as his predecessor who SHOULD have been an object lesson for everyone involved.