I turned off the Fox News/Google Debate after about 40 minutes because I was in kind of a bad mood and I just couldn’t take any more lunacy. I had not noticed that Governor Rick Perry was having a particularly bad night. However, Perry seems to fade in the latter half of debates, and he apparently had a rather disastrous second hour. For me, it’s hard to tell who is doing well in Republican debates and who is not. I noticed that Michele Bachmann said that we are all entitled to 100% of the money we earn. For me, that’s so ridiculous that a giant hook should have come out and yanked her off the stage and into a paddy wagon. But for an audience that boos active-duty soldiers and cheers executions, it could have been the best line of the night. I am not a crazy asshole, so who am I to say?
However, it appears that Rick Perry’s biggest sin was to defend in-state tuition for the children of undocumented workers.
“If you say that we should not educate children who come into our state for no other reason than that they’ve been brought there through no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart,” Perry said. “We need to be educating these children because they will become a drag on our society. I think that’s what Texans wanted to do. Out of 181 members of the Texas legislature when this issue came up [there were] only four dissenting votes. This was a state issue. Texas voted on it. And I still support it today.”
The next day, Romney came out swinging:
“My friend Governor Perry said that if you don’t agree with his position on giving that in-state tuition to illegals, then you don’t have a heart,” Romney said. “I think if you’re opposed to illegal immigration, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have a heart; it means that you have a heart and a brain.”
But Romney could have kept his mouth shut because practically every conservative commentator in the country panned Perry’s response and his overall performance.
That Perry’s biggest problem was his position on in-state tuition for immigrants was clear in Frank Luntz’s post-debate focus group, but he got no love for the rest of his performance either.
Famed lunatic John Podhoretz of the New York Post noted, “Just awful. After the first half hour, he seemed unable to speak a coherent sentence, even when he was carefully prepared — and he made a cringe-inducing bungle of a rehearsed soundbite about Romney’s flip-flopping. It was one of the worst moments I can remember.” Michelle Malkin said, ““any random high schooler at the CPAC conference in Washington could have done better than this.” Erick Erickson panned the whole field. “Good Lord,” Erickson wrote, “this was the worst debate I think I’ve ever watched.” Bill Kristol penned a column entitled ‘Yikes’ that begged New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to come to the rescue.
Now, if I were a conservative I wouldn’t be happy with the field of candidates either. I would be unimpressed with Rick Perry’s oratorical and debating skills, too. I’d be less excited about Mitt Romney than I am discussing wallpaper glue. I totally get this element of the criticism. But Rick Perry continues to get hammered for the very few decent things he has ever done in his life. In the last debate, he was lambasted for providing a HPV vaccine to the girls of Texas so that they won’t die of cervical cancer later on in life. Yeah, I know that his decision was probably more about lining his pockets with Merck-money than any true compassion, but he did do the right thing. The crazy Texas legislature freaked out and overruled him, so cervical cancer is safe for now, at least in the Lone Star State.
And, now, in this debate he’s getting killed for showing some basic human decency and not punishing children for the sins of their parents. According to Perry, there were only four dissenting votes when he passed the in-state tuition bill. If that’s true, what does it say about the national Republican Party that they hate Latinos immeasurably more than the Texas GOP?
We’re talking about a guy who executed an innocent man and then abused the power of his office to cover it up. And he’s too liberal and decent to be the Republican nominee for president?
Folks, this is beyond ridiculous. It’s downright scary.
