R. Perry, Lummox from Texas

If you do a Google search on 10 reasons why R. Perry should not be the President of the U.S., you will find a large number of such lists of various sizes ranging as high as 21, though many other reasons could also be added, because the more you learn about him, the more this man has all the appearance of a man carrying -- like an impossibly fertile opossum mother -- an unusually large number of such shortcomings clinging to his chest as much as to his back.   Yet he is still being seen by some as this large, noble knight who, mounted on his mighty Texas steed (snow white of course), finally charged out of the burning wastes a couple of months ago and came to the rescue not only of the pack of Republican aspirants for the Presidency, who, for all their efforts, were fast being seen as just a gang of mangy armadillos, aimlessly milling around.   Not only that but numbers of people who consider themselves as rational beyond all doubt also actually see this man as the one most qualified to lead the United States, ahead of all the country's other 300 million inhabitants, and never mind what that says about the country's inhabitants.

Not that Presidential elections have anything to do with picking the best person in the country for the job.   Far from it.  Oceans away from it.   But still....

I first became reasonably aware of Perry a couple of years ago, when he announced that he supported the idea of the secession of Texas from the rest of the United States.

I would think that in a world where a reasonable number of heads and necks are in the proper alignment with each other, that position alone would leave him completely out of anyone's conception of him as the U.S. President, and never mind all the rest of those other nine or however many other reasons, all of them also quite legitimate.   But maybe, just as Perry's party hungers to make the U.S. government smaller, which can only be done by chopping away many important parts of it and shoving them into the stove, similarly that party's ultimate aim in seeing him as being such a credible candidate would be to channel his secessionist tendencies into making the U.S. smaller, and that can also be done only by some serious demolition work, on the World Trade Center scale of things.   Therefore this man's  avid supporters are fighting to put into the Oval Office a man whose only purpose would be to total the country like a recklessly driven car, to reduce it to a state not of Texas but of a place where not enough would be left even to send to the crusher.

I can't put my finger on it right now but one list that I saw put forth another reason to forget about Perry that especially stuck in my mind, and that is that he is dumb.   But whether we are talking about his urge to imitate the state of things that brought on the Civil War, or about social security, medicare, climate change, short-changing education, force-innoculating young girls, or any other issue, and when we remember how at Texas A&M, a merely so-so college, he struggled through with a long series of C's and D's, his obvious obtuseness is an over-arching trait that colors everything else about him.   So it seems to me that by treasuring him, the G.O.P. is maligning not only the U.S. but the huge (though not necessarily great) state of Texas itself, by creating here a tradition of putting up for President Texas governors who were notably dense and are therefore seen by that party as being superbly qualified to lead the U.S.  For now it has been established beyond all doubt that GW Bush's boat was also none too swift.  Instead it was the absolute opposite, and now that party can only offer more of the same. 

All this is totally incredible . . .and pitiful. 

I wrote the first draft of this post a while ago, soon after Perry threw his hat into the ring, and since then I have noticed an interesting thing happening.   After having at first been quite happy with Perry, the media forces who consider it their job rather than the voters to determine the U.S. President, have now begun to reconsider and are slowly backing away from him, mainly on the grounds that he has turned out to be too slow-witted, especially in debates.   And so now he is being quietly dumped from contention, and the nod is being handed back to the original G.O.P. front runner, M. Romney.

I guess the insidious powers-that-be have started thinking that they need somebody who is more than just a men's wear clothing dummy, and also just a male version of Sarah Palin, but without her entertainment values.  To appear on the same podium with Obama, they would need someone who at least looks as if he might know what the question was.