Submitted by Elaine Magliaro
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A Sunday Morning Video: Mark Fiore’s “Rick Perry’s Operation Strong Candidate”
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Elaine,
It never ceases to amaze me how people who have proven themselves to be idiots like Rick Perry can garner attention as pundits in America. How quickly the “prophets” of the media forget Perry’s ludicrous performance in the 2012 Campaign and take him seriously as he prepares for 2016. Then again a breathless media still reports on the pronouncements of sociopaths like Sarah Palin.
She and Perry are living proof that even the terminally ignorant can gain a following by the expediency of “talking tough”. How pathetically sad.
Mike,
Here’s a Salon article you might find interesting:
Rick Perry’s deadly “charm”: May have executed innocent man … but dopey press loves his new glasses!
The evidence keeps building that Texas covered up its execution of an innocent man. Oh well! Isn’t he dreamy?
Jim Newell
8/5/14
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/05/rick_perrys_deadly_charm_may_have_executed_innocent_man_but_dopey_press_loves_his_new_glasses/
Excerpt:
Rick Perry is just so … adorable. And hardworking. And charming!
Did you know this? It’s the gist of a big long profile of “The New Rick Perry” in National Journal, the latest in a series of Rick Perry Is Adorable pieces to have emerged as the longtime Texas governor mulls another presidential run. The last one didn’t get very far, mostly because Perry hadn’t prepared and was all drugged up following back surgery and also isn’t a very bright guy. But the New Rick Perry is ready for the next sucker, according to this puff piece published in National Journal, which opens with a 10-million-word explanation for why Rick Perry now wears eyeglasses, and then offers credulous passage after passage. “The new Perry isn’t just working harder than his 2012 incarnation. He’s also seeking to occupy a different political space,” the author, Michelle Cottle, writes. “Last time, Perry ran as a conservative firebrand. This time, with Cruz and others sucking up all the oxygen on the right, he is trying out a new message. Forget the wild-eyed cowboy squawking about how Texas might be forced to secede from the union. Today’s Perry is pitching himself as a thoughtful, seasoned elder statesman.” Sure he is.
And does Cottle mention how charming Rick Perry is?
• “One Perry asset that was largely obscured in 2012 is just how charming he can be one-on-one.”
• “Whether or not you find him good-looking, it’s tough not to at least find him personally charming.”
• “You can tell that, even as he deploys his innate, somewhat free-wheeling charm, Perry is also mindful of the need to tread carefully.”
He is, in sum, a dreamboat: “Looking especially presidential — gray suit, burnt-orange tie, and, at 64, still the best head of hair in politics — he bounced from topic to topic, but kept returning to a couple of overarching themes.”
Around the same time that National Journal was publishing this press release from Rick Perry’s political team, the Washington Post was publishing a piece of journalism regarding a case with which Perry is well familiar: the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was convicted of burning his house down and murdering his three young daughters trapped inside, and ultimately put to death in 2004.
The Willingham case — which is not mentioned once in Cottle’s lengthy Perry profile — has not aged well. Forensic experts have settled around the conclusion that the fire was not arson and more likely the result of an accident. When Perry was governor, he dismissed last-minute appeals to stay Willingham’s execution. He’s also fired members from and gutted the Texas Forensic Science Commission who’ve cast doubt and tried to hold hearings on the matter.
The case against Willingham relied not just on phony arson experts who didn’t know what they were talking about, but also on testimony from an inmate who claimed that Willingham spontaneously confessed the crime to him in prison. The prosecutor, John Jackson, has for years denied that he offered the inmate witness, Johnny Webb, anything in return for his testimony. But new evidence in the Post story, in the form of letters between Webb, Jackson and others, shows pretty clearly that Jackson offered Webb a lot – a reduced prison sentence and cash from a wealthy rancher friend — and spent years trying to secure those things for him.
Newly uncovered letters and court files show that Jackson worked diligently to intercede for Webb after his testimony and to coordinate with the rancher, Charles S. Pearce Jr., to keep the mercurial informer in line.
“Mr. Pierce and I visit on a regular basis concerning your problems,” Jackson wrote to Webb in August 2000, eight years after the trial, when his former witness was threatening to recant. (Jackson misspelled the rancher’s last name.) “We worked for a long time on a number of different levels, including the Governor’s Office, to get you released early in the robbery case. . . . Please understand that I am not indifferent or insensitive to your difficulties.” […]
Jackson’s campaign for Webb’s early release escalated in May 1996, after Webb reported that he continued to receive threats and demanded to be transferred to federal prison or the Navarro County Jail.
“Here the state offered me certain benefits in exchange for my testimony which resulted in sending a man to death row,” Webb wrote to Jackson. “Because I kept my end of the promise, the state is bound to uphold theirs until my release from incarceration.”
What we have here is further evidence that the Willingham trial was a joke and that the state, when led by Rick Perry, may well have executed an innocent man, something that Perry has exerted a lot of energy trying to cover up. This should be very bad for Rick Perry if he runs for president, again…
You’ll notice that Hutchison’s campaign didn’t hit Perry forthrightly for, well, presiding over the execution of an innocent man. It hit Perry for giving liberals an excuse to whine about the death penalty, as though that would be unwarranted.
Why did Hutchison’s team dance around the issue? As we found out later, it was because her campaign had focus grouped various Willingham messages and found that the “killing an innocent man” thing somehow helped Perry among Republicans.
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/state/headlines/20140816-defiant-perry-vows-to-beat-political-prosecution.ece
“Perry has “tried to get all of state government under his total control,” said Glenn Smith, a former aide to Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby and now leader of Progress Texas, a Democratic activist group. “That’s not the way Texas government is set up.”
Smith attributed Perry’s action in the Lehmberg case to the “arrogance of power.”
“Having run a one-party state for so long,” Smith said, “they believe that they’re always right and the law doesn’t matter, and if they want to do something, it’s just necessarily OK to do because they face no real opposition.”
Smith said Democrats, who controlled state government for decades, faced the same hubris, which he said resulted in the 1971 Sharpstown stock fraud scandal that prompted indictments against the House speaker and others.
Perry has grown to be this “authoritarian, don’t-challenge-me leader,” Smith said. “It’s the environment he’s created for himself.” I would not be surprised if Perry beats this and winds up in the 2016 debates, again
sounds more like he’s put a coat of whitewash on ni**erhead.
This Austin D.A.’s office indicted Kay Bailey Hutchinson & she got off & went on to represent Texas in the Senate.
This is a ******** Beer Garden plot. The legislators & politicos met at ******** & dreamed up plots like this. The later in the evening & the more pitchers of beer consumed , the crazier the plots became. The problem Rick Perry has is that his handlers occasionally fail him. The handlers have a lot of experience getting him through the primary but it was no contest in the general election. Presidential politics is particularly dirty.
A lot of dirty tricks are played & reporters are looking for dirt that is often turned over to them by private investigators hired by vested interests. Perry has A tack on the oil & gas lobby which includes power plants, electricity companies, gas companies & gas stations.
Governor Perry has an Ace to play. He should go off to New York City to meet with Donald Trump and set up a press conference in a day or two with the New York & national press. While he is out of state the Lt Governor takes his place & acts as Governor. Well, the Governor has the right to pardon those accused of crimes. If the temporary Governor pardons Rick Perry the matter is over. He can request a column in Salon.
“Governor Perry has an Ace to play. He should go off to New York City to meet with Donald Trump and set up a press conference in a day or two with the New York & national press.”
Did you hear the joke that starts with: “Two morons met in New York City…………………………….”
No, but I’m willing to listen !! Perhaps even reread it in the Statesmen ?