Rick Perry is a dangerous guy

Rick Perry is a dangerous guy

Will someone with mass media please expose the president want-to-be from Texas for what he really is — dangerous?

Gov. Rick Perry is being marketed as a business friendly, anti-tax, deficit-cutting conservative Republican chosen by God himself to lead the nation to the economic promised land beginning in 2012. His bio suggests that half the new jobs were created in Texas because he is the governor. One bio picture depicts him in full pilot regalia — flight suit, sunglasses, helmet under arm in front of a sleek jet aircraft, gazing toward the heavens, suggesting a fighter pilot anticipating his next combat mission.

Perry is really a converted Democrat, switching political parties when it became apparent that Texas was swinging to the right and once in the GOP fold had to be be a business friendly, anti-tax, conservative to be elected. His religious devotion is probably sincere, although certainly convenient given his target audience. Texas has created many new jobs while Perry has been governor, but mostly due to sky-rocketing oil prices, government jobs due to population growth and “snatching” of jobs from areas of the country due to Texas’ tax incentives. During the same period the state budget deficit went up, health care coverage down, and number of minimum wage jobs up.

He attended Texas A&M, entered the Air Force and indeed became a pilot — flying turboprop cargo aircraft in Europe in the mid ’70s — hardly the experience his bio picture taken in front of an Air Force training aircraft suggests.

Gov. Rick Perry hit the campaign trail and although supposedly in an early GOP primary, directs most of his rhetoric toward the sitting president or anybody connected with the current administration. His most recent suggestions being that the president may not be patrotic and the Fed chairman may be committing treason by holding the interest rates low. He certainly says what he thinks which might be refreshing, given today’s political climate, but is worrisome if pictured in a foreign policy sense.

Deeper investigation into Gov. Perry, I think, will expose him for what he really is — another shoot-from-the-lip West Texas cowboy seeking a position for which he is neither intellectually nor sufficiently experienced to fill. We’ve been down this road before with George W. Bush, a Texas “cowboy” educated at Yale. How did that work out for you?

Tom Sedlock, Mineral Ridge