Rick Perry wants to invade Mexico. With that, I believe Governor Perry’s fifteen minutes are up and it’s time to invoke the designated savior rule once again. As soon as the beltway media settles the issue of whether he’s too fat to be President, I believe Chris Christie’s fifteen minutes are next. He better hurry up because his carriage turns into a pumpkin on Halloween.
Update: His hunting lodge was called “Niggerhead” well into his time as governor. Last one out of the “Perry for President” offices, turn out the lights. (Thanks to commenter xian for pointing that out.)
WereBear
Is this a Texas thing? Have they not gotten over it YET?
Nate
So Perry’s not the next GW Bush, he’s the next James K Polk.
Joey Maloney
What. A. Tool.
Alex S.
Seems like it wasn’t necessarily the bad debate performance that hurt his campaign, but his stance on immigration, hence this overreaction. In 2008, John McCain was still able to get the nomination with his moderate position on that issue. Maybe that’s not possible anymore. (Of course, the John McCain of 2010 was a caricature of the John McCain of 2008)
JPL
The wealthy in Mexico hire their own security guards and are not interested in paying higher taxes to support an adequate police force. The Koch brothers think this a feature not a bug. Mexico has a terrible situation of their own making.
squirrelhugger
It doesn’t appear he identified a funding source for that invasion.
Mustang Bobby
But what about Jeb!? If the GOP can seriously consider Perry, who is a bad caricature of his brother, the least they can do is give him his fifteen minutes of being courted.
xian
Mike Allen from Politico reports this morning that Perry’s hunting lodge is called “Niggerhead.”
JCT
Note to GOP: when you run ill-prepared idiots for President this sort of inanity is what ensues.
Please try harder. kthxbai.
Oh and Christie the asshole will not fly either. Insufficiently racist.
Mino
Mexico should be the one invading the US to help with our drug problem. We’re one big sucking sound.
amk
The assholery factor with these racist mofos keeps getting worse with each new entrant, doesn’t it ?
Mino
@xian: That was a very well- kept secret. The knives are out for Perry in truth. I just hope it leads to his retirement altogether.
Jay C
@squirrelhugger:
“Funding”? He’s probably going to stick to the standard GOP model: when planning military actions for
political showboating“national security” reasons, just “fund” it off-the-books and ignore the cost!Worked for Shrub Bush…..
debbie
Genius! Invade Mexico AND continue selling tens of thousands of guns to the cartels. We can now fight ourselves!
Free Market! Second Amendment Rights!
gaz
@JPL: Of their own making? We’ve contributed to their problems quite a bit over the years.
The War On Drugs is used as a threat to the Mexican government to keep them carrying water for our interests.
Won’t sell us oil at below market prices? We’ll show you! War on Drugs!!!
Won’t buy our corn (and displace your own farmers?) War On Drugs!
etc.
While Mexico has many self inflicted wounds, we are there to twist the knife, pick the scabs, and pour sewage over the open sores.
harlana
@JCT:
I would say, give him some time (after he starts trying to appeal teabaggers, which I have a hard time seeing him do, however), but I don’t believe he’s actually going to run. So he may remain sane & reasonable in that regard – will be difficult to backtrack on that, however, esp. with regard to Mooslims, but we don’t know what the climate will be in 2016, which is a better bet for Christie if he loses some of the weight
still, he’s an asshole who would scare off those skittish independents so I can’t see him winning the GE in 2016, the party nomination (depending on whether the right has completely fallen off a cliff trying to go right as possible)
Ksmiami
wow so you were a fan of echo and the bunnymen too!
RossInDetroit
Nobody got the Echo and the Bunnymen lyric quote?
Step up your games, folks!
RossInDetroit
@Ksmiami:
@simultaneous!
RSA
I wonder how it would be taken if a Mexican presidential candidate said that the drug problem is best addressed on the demand side, rather than the supply side, and suggested that the Mexican army invade U.S. border states? No, I don’t really wonder.
piratedan
@Nate: hey, at least Polk built national institutions (The Treasury) instead of being hellbent to tear them down.
Mark S.
@Alex S.:
I’d be surprised if immigration is what’s killing Perry, because that issue has kind of been on the back burner lately. I’m inclined to think it’s probably Perry calling Social Security an unconstitutional Ponzi scheme. I think that’s a bridge too far for many of the teabagger-curious.
John Weiss
Rick Perry is a bad governor. He’d be a worse President. And he has no chance of becoming the latter.
No chance.
Comrade Dread
This isn’t surprising.
All of the supposed justifications for using an army to fight terrorism are present.
And with our supply of Predator drones, it would be pretty simple and low cost for the US to start flying armed Predators over the border to conduct targeted strikes.
I’m just surprised it’s taken someone in the GOP this long to make the suggestion to let Freedom Bombs rain.
jon
In Phoenix there’s Squaw Peak. Used to be Squaw Tit Peak, but that wasn’t selective enough in its sexism. Progress is slow.
Slower in some places than others, apparently.
jon
Mexico may or may not be a failed state. Sure, the drug cartels could take out the government. But they don’t.
My theory is that the cartels don’t want to bother with sewers, school boards, road construction, utility poles, medical policies, immigration issues, funding for parks, tax revenue enforcement, liquor licensing laws, traffic flow, university costs, mining regulations, and ice hockey arenas in Wasilla. They’re like Republicans, only smart enough not to promote their libertarian fantasies as good government policy.
piratedan
@jon: hasn’t it been renamed for Lori Piestewa? granted I can imagine that there’s plenty of folks that prefer the former appellation, but still….
Keith
Gov. Perry is sounding more and more like a character from “Machete”…surreal.
jon
@piratedan: It has, but the name “Squaw Peak” is on many businesses and will linger for some time. There’s even a Hilton hotel with the old name.
On a happier note, a unit at the women’s prison in Perryville was named after Piestewa without having it be called “Squaw” at any previous time. New construction, naturally.
gaz
What’s surprising to me is that Rick Perry has decided that we should invade Mexico as though we weren’t already engaged in said occupation.
gaz
@Keith: Lol
With Steven Segal playing Rick Perry.
Thank you Keith, for the humorous visual. Wow
Mino
Steven Segal doesn’t have enough hair.
gaz
@Mino: Couldn’t he just skin and blow dry a marmot, and call it good? =)
Alex S.
@Mark S.:
I guess that would have really hurt him in Florida, not so much in Iowa or South Carolina. But yeah, a Romney win in Florida might have tipped the scale.
wenchacha
The Wapo article is illuminating, albeit disturbing. Apparently, the camp name came with the place, and “nobody thought much of it.” They’re different there in Texas; oh yes they are.
Note: I realize this is not what the entire state is about, but the fucking superintendent of the schools in the area tells us that they didn’t have any of that protesting about civil rights in their section of Texas, and the blacks were pretty well satisfied with what they had. He didn’t add, “if they knew what was good for them.”
Slavery is a poisonous legacy in our country that continues to leach into our citizenry even today.
Om another note: Ken Burns has an article in USA Today Weekend magazine about his new doc on Prohibition. It is timely in its tale of how one group bent on drying out the country used xenophobia and absolutism to deny everyone else the right to enjoy alcohol.
Frankensteinbeck
…same as the old messiah?
Hal
Wow. Wikipedia is already updated:
That was as of today
Cain
Wow.. A *Hunting* lodge with a racial slur in it. So blacks can have an image of Perry with his guns hunting and hanging out at “Niggerheads” Black comedy folks. Pun intended.
Keith
@wenchacha: I know several born-n-bred Texans who are unabashedly racist (East Texas). Not as segregated or as open as, say, Alabama, but in the company of all-whites, “nigger” is thrown around quite frequently and unapologetically. LOTS of hatred for minorities in this area. I recall being in a town next to Vidor where a guy I didn’t even know was telling me (in a quite animated fashion) about how he pulled his supposedly star-HS-football-player-son off the team because the coach was black. He even claimed to have told the principal that “no way is my son gonna play for no nigger.” Crazy stuff.
ruemara
I’d really like to get a job that takes me away from this country for a while. You’re not all crazy, you’re not all racists, and damned if I don’t understand that racism is everywhere in every shade and it’s the job of good people to stand up to it, but sometimes, I’d just like a break. And to earn a decent living for the work I can do, instead of being reminded that black, female and in a creative field is 2 strikes against me, over 40 now being the 3rd.
wrb
@jon:
In Oregon the were dozens of Squaw place names. Squaw Creek, Sqaw Valley. Passed a law forcing change.
Pissed of a couple of Indians I know.
Thought the name change was intended as an insult to their people.
Mino
@gaz: Or just train a marmot(let’s leave out the bloodshed).
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
Re: Niggerhead: I’m sure there are dozens of plausible explanations for the name, and that it’s all a misunderstanding. Also, freedom.
/facepalm
Mino
@Keith: Texas recently put to death one of the men guilty of murdering a random black by dragging him behind a pickup truck down the highway.
Just unbelievable. And they never showed an ounce of remorse.
Anoniminous
Herb Cain will get the GOP presidential nomination when Sus scrofa exhibits aviational proficiency.
jon
@wrb: There’s always that element when a wrong gets righted. They weren’t slighted before in their mind, and they’re free to feel not slighted or slighted with whatever change is put in. Just like some people still call themselves “colored”, sometimes a name is just is a name because that’s what it is. I honestly grew up thinking “squaw” only meant an Indian woman and only saw it said by movie Indians and maybe someone on F Troop, but then I moved from Minneapolis suburbs to Arizona and saw actual Indians and poverty and oppression rather than the guys who outsmart those silly cavalry doofuses.
I personally don’t understand why they bothered calling it Squaw Peak in Arizona, as Squaw Tit Peak was at least descriptive. Changing it halfway definitely made it an insult. Of course, back whenever that was they didn’t have a convenient war casualty to make the change politically easy enough.
jon
A little more on the origin of “squaw“, just enough to explain the controversy or muddy it up.
wrb
@jon:
In the case of the guys I know, they saw the name as documenting previous occupation, and the name change as an attempt to remove the evidence.
In there minds, it was called Squaw Valley because squaws were found there, thus it had been Indian land.
JWL
I still say we should invade, occupy, and incorporate Canada instead.
Resistance would be futile. Any Canadian inclined to fuss or squawk could be shipped out and deposited south of the Rio Grande. Over time, they would exert a moderating influence on Mexican society. It would be a win-win for the U.S.A.
Yutsano
@JWL: That’s been tried once before:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Acadians
(and FYWP)
JWL
Yutsano: Your link is inoperative.
Let me guess: I seem to recall Louisiana cajuns were borne of Canadians forcibly exiled way-back-when.
Which bears my strategic reasoning out. It proved a marvelously successful forced emigration, in every sense of the word- music, cuisine… attitude. The world is better off because of it.
Granted, that cajun omelette wasn’t made without breaking a few eggs. But it worked out just fine.
mclaren
As I predicted. Rick Perry is self-destructing because he’s just too insane (but not far-right enough) for the Republican base.
Jebediah
RE the hunting lodge name: Perry can’t possibly be racist; he GOVERNS black people! That’s a way more important relationship than just being friends with them.
QED libtards!
/wingnut
catclub
@JWL: “But it worked out just fine.”
Same sentiment about the Irish potato famine is not too popular. The IPF was of course orders of magnitude more deaths than the ejection of the Acadians, but of course the ejection of the Acadians was on purpose. In both events the English were ‘not on the side of the angels’.
Mike G
@Keith:
Ah yes, Vidor, in east TX. A working-class town of over 10,000 people with not a single black resident. This is difficult to explain, given that “racism is a thing of the past in America”.
Chauncey DeVega
There is a bigger history of sundown towns here that also demands comment:
http://wearerespectablenegroes.blogspot.com/2011/10/ricky-perrys-newest-problem-his-fond.html
JWL
Catclub: I went for a chuckle, and a pretty obvious one at that, and you saw fit to drag in the fuckin’ potato famine. Way to go.
Kilkee
@catclub: Of course, the British response to the so-called “famine” is what counts. There was a failure of the potato crop. For much of the British leadership, the resultant death and emigration was literally a Godsend, since it squared with their plans to see Ireland turned into a giant grazing meadow for the Brits. Even without the potato there was plenty of food in Ireland, if the Brits had let it stay there, rather than be exported. Let’s just say they weren’t really concerned about the deaths of millions of Irish.
JWL
Catclub: You’re wearing me down.
But explain once again how my surreal/absurdist cheering-on that America invade Canada invokes a comparison with the Irish potato famine.
By the way, my heritage is Irish.
Faux News
@ Nate: yes Perry is like Polk, but this time the Mexicans will greet us with flowers and dancing! Just like they did in Iraq.
Note: Perhaps the next GOP Messiah (Fat Boy from NJ?)decides to up the ante with Perry and says he will invade Canada. To stop all the pot from Vancouver of course. I might just have to vote for him though. It’s becoming time for the dissolution of the United States of America.
suzanne
@jon:
It’s actually Piestewa Peak now.
Kilkee
I know it’s really sophomoric, but if Christie gets in, will we not all be overwhelmed by Mr. Creosote videos?
honus
@jon: That’s because it was the “tit” that was offensive, not the “squaw”
Jenny
“Niggerhead” and invading Mexico will only help Perry in a GOP primary that largely thinks Obama wasn’t born in the US and is a moooslim.