Rick Perry is the complete package

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Walter Shapiro at The New Republic:

[W]hat sets Perry apart and earns him his niche in the far right corner of Mount Rushmore has nothing to do with the gyrations of the 2012 campaign. Indeed, Perry is not only a presidential candidate, but also a cowboy-booted sociological experiment. It is almost as if Perry's political persona was constructed by bundling together all the fears and phantoms in the left-wing anxiety closet. Since the hysteria of the 1950s Red Scare, no Republican figure has matched Perry in his God-given ability to give liberals the heebie-jeebies. Others can rival the governor's disdain for academic achievement (Palin), his cross-on-the-sleeve religiosity (Michele Bachmann and Mike Huckabee), and his antipathy to Social Security and Medicare (Paul Ryan and Barry Goldwater). But never before has a top-tier presidential candidate embodied the whole lethal package -- and more.

Give the piece a read. Like this post by Greg Sargent at The Washington Post, and like we've been doing in post after post here at The Reaction, it exposes Perry as the crazy extremist he really is.

Crazy and extreme even by today's Republican standards. And not just because of "fears and phantoms" but because what he stands for, and what he represents, and what he is, is very much a threat to liberalism, and to the very idea of America as something other than a fundamentalist theocracy dedicated to the pursuit of a vicious right-wing political agenda.

Which, yes, is pretty fucking scary.