PALIN, PERRY, AND THE ROLLING STONES
On June 12, 1964, at Big Reggie’s Danceland Ballroom in Excelsior, Minnesota (on Lake Minnetonka west of Minneapolis), The Rolling Stones gave a performance during their first American tour. They were little-known back then (everyone was into Beatlemania), they were drunk, played poorly, and got booed off the stage by the audience of 300.
The next morning, Mick Jagger went into Bacon’s Drug Store to fill a prescription. Standing in front of him was a local character named Jimmy Hutmaker, Excelsior’s retarded town mascot whom everyone befriended. Jimmy wanted his usual morning pick-me-up, a cherry coke – but the fellow who manned the soda fountain said they were out of cherry syrup, so he gave Jimmy a regular coke.
Whereupon Jimmy turned to Mick, shrugged his shoulders, and said, "You can’t always get what you want."
Jagger never forgot what "Mr. Jimmy" said, and used it to create an achingly extraordinary rock and roll masterpiece (with the beginning and closing chorus sung by the London Bach Choir):
Oh, you can’t always get what you want
Oh, you can’t always get what you want
Oh, you can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, you just might find
You get what you need
The song has been haunting me for the last several days. I have listened to it a score of times (the link is to the original 1968 recording which was used as a soundtrack for the House television series), during breaks reading a particular book.
And thus I have arrived at a conclusion: However much we want Sarah Palin, what we need is Rick Perry.
Last week’s HFR (8/12) discussed the odds of a Hillary candidacy and Zero being LBJ Redux, a Wisconsin lady infuriating the left nationwide, the massive threat of Dem vote fraud in 2012, the absurdity of the left’s smear on Rick Perry being "pro-Sharia" and why Ismailism is a peaceful form of Islam, why Chris Christie by contrast is a sharia apologist, Ron Paul’s Hate America & Israel foreign policy on full display, the phony protests in Chinese Turkestan, and that China’s debt problems are worse than Portugal’s.
As of now, this HFR has received a record number of comments on the Forum, well over 200 – with all but a small fraction ignoring everything else except Rick Perry, devolving into a debate between pro- and anti-Perry TTPers.
I’m not about to try and settle this – and no matter who’s right, the debate has been very informative. I’ll just suggest certain considerations for the debate in hopes they may be taken into account as the debate continues, as it no doubt will.
First, every election we always hear that this one is "the most important of our lifetimes" – but in 2012, it is in fact true. This is the Big One. America is right now on the brink of full-on economic collapse and a full-on 1984 Fascist Dictatorship thanks to an almost fatal error electing Zero. Zero’s re-election would remove the "almost."
Second, the ABO – Anyone But Obama – argument is silly. The monumental damage Zero has done has momentum, inertia. It will keep going even without him. It will take a counterforce to slow it down to where capitalist repair mechanisms can exceed the rate of damage. The absolute minimum, then, for a Republican nominee is someone who can supply at least this counterforce.
Third, the Buckley argument is the opposite of silly. Bill Buckley averred that he would always support the most conservative electable candidate in a race – and expected everyone to note the qualifier. There may be exceptions to this, but 2012 is not one of them.
Fourth, for such a conservative electable candidate to effectively supply the sufficient counterforce, he or she must target not only the active damage of the Dems, but the passive damage of the Rinos whose SOP is chronic wimping out to Dem intimidation.
Fifth, the most dynamic game-changing force in US politics today is the Tea Parties. All of the above requires a nominee who has their enthusiastic support, and who can focus their efforts into successful victories for the White House, Senate, and House – and a successful seizure of the machinery of the Republican Party itself.
Sixth, if you want perfection, die and go to heaven, as that’s the only place you’ll find it. If you want a Messiah, pray for the Second Coming, but don’t demand it of a Republican presidential candidate. If you want miracles, pray that the Almighty will perform them, but don’t expect them to be performed by a human being, POTUS or no.
Seventh, in 2012, the Dems are going to conduct the most immoral electoral campaign in American history – and do it with over a billion dollars. The smears, the lies, the politics of personal destruction, the cheating and vote fraud will be nuclear.
We are fighting to get the government out of our lives – they are fighting for their survival as the only existence they know is as moochers and parasites. And the only morality they know is: the end justifies the means. Anything goes. There are no rules and no laws that apply to them.
Which means we must have a candidate capable of standing up to this, who will be as cold-blooded cutthroat as they are, and can raise the hundreds of millions to do so.
Bottom line: this is as serious as it gets, life or death for America, millions of Americans consigned to poverty, tyranny, and the clear possibility of massive bloodshed, or not. So we need to choose our horse in the race with ruthless realism.
Let’s start winnowing out the unelectable folks no matter how nice they are or how principled or ego-driven who have no chance whatever of winning the Pub primaries much less the general: Gingrich, Santorum, Cain, McCotter, Huntsman, and Paul. They may stay in to get their points across in the debates, but that’s it.
Of the declared candidates, that leaves Bachmann, Romney, and Perry. The least electable is Bachmann. She’s wonderfully pro-American, her many fans adore her with good reason. But that’s not good enough. She’s not cutthroat enough and she can’t raise enough money.
Which is why so many of her supporters are switching to Perry, and her paid-for Ames victory didn’t amount to a bale of hay.
So we’re left with Romney and Perry. This is not a fair fight. But politics never is. Our guy is going to be up against a Dem who will try to knee him in the groin and gouge his eyes out. Who do you want in the ring against him? Rick, who jogs with a .380 Ruger, plugs a coyote with it and laughs, "Now he’s mulch" – or Mitt, whose response to queries on Romneycare, will be as one wag puts it, to "rope-a-dope himself to the mat"?
What’s funny is that it’s taken the Rino Establishment all of five days (it’s Thursday and Perry declared last Saturday) to figure out that Perry is going eat Romney for a breakfast snack and are already frantically searching for a replacement – someone, anyone who can stop Perry.
So suddenly there’s this flurry of desperate "leaks" about Paul Ryan or Chris Christie running, which the non-candidates have to wearily shoot down.
The fact is, both the Dems and the Rinos are afraid of Perry. They are afraid of him. That’s who we need, someone they are scared of. Is there anyone else?
Did I hear someone say Sarah?
Yes, the only two folks who strike fear into Dem and Rino hearts alike are Palin and Perry. So let me tell you what she’s going to do.
Palin is a huntress. She is now watching her quarries, Perry and Zero, watching and waiting. She knows Perry will be hit with a tsunami of smears, lies, distortions, the full monty of personal destruction. She’s been hit with it, stood right up to it, and is still standing. Can Perry? Will he still be standing after the tsunami washes over him or will he be swept away?
That’s what Palin is waiting to see. If he’s still standing and fighting back as hard as ever, then she endorses and campaigns for him. If he’s swept away, she declares her candidacy.
This will not take long. The Dems and Rinos are going for a quick knockout. The deluge has already started, e.g., ridiculing Texas jobs (which means ridiculing Texas, how smart is that?)[1] or accusing him of executing an innocent man.[2]
Next up – watch for it – will be rumors and reports that he’s a closet homosexual. They’ve already begun circulating a rumor about him and some unnamed veterinarian in Dallas. This is drivel, of course. Perry is a man’s man, and a real woman’s man too. The contrast between his true masculinity and Zero’s metrosexuality is so overt that the Dems will do anything to demean it.
Yet what about all the criticism of Perry from our side, which are genuine concerns such as requiring HPV vaccinations and accusations of crony capitalism regarding wind energy or toll roads?
These and others raise legitimate questions, and the debate among them on the Forum will continue. I, for example, don’t understand how Perry can think warmism is a "phony mess" yet be all for some expensive renewable energy program. For me, though, his contempt for the EPA and ethanol subsidies plus being a total drill-baby-drill guy way overcomes this.
And that’s really the issue. Whenever we have to make an important real world decision, it’s always weighing the assets against the liabilities. It’s never all of the former and none of the latter. For me, Perry’s assets – particularly for the fight we’re in – overwhelm his liabilities.
We need a president who wants to turn the terrorist enemies of America into mulch, who’s a climate skeptic’s dream, who says, "Mr. Obama talks a lot about jobs, but the only job he really cares about is the one he’s got," whose electoral strategy is "to keep your boot on your opponent’s neck until after the election and all the votes are counted."
We need a president who tells the press in interviews and writes in print that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are "bankrupt," that they are "Ponzi schemes." Who writes that two "great milestones on the road to serfdom" for America were the passage of the 16th and 17th Amendments.
You can find these statements in his book, Fed Up! Our Fight To Save America From Washington. It’s the book I mentioned above that I’ve been reading. His main theme, his main vehicle to reclaim our country from the federalies, is the 10th Amendment. States can do all kinds of things that Washington cannot is one primary lesson he draws from it.
The lesson I draw from his is that a lot of things he has done as governor that are questionable would be unconstitutional anathema to him as president. I cannot encourage you more to read his book, read his passion for the 10th Amendment, then judge for yourself.
We’re in the fight of our lives, folks – a street fight for our lives with no rules. The only thing that matters is who wins as that’s the way the enemy plays. If we don’t have a go-for-the-jugular ruthless street fighter on our side, we lose.
I don’t see anyone else but Perry or Palin – and if Perry is still standing by the end of September (the latest Palin has said she would get in), it’s him with Palin behind him.
You don’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need.
[1] . For an accurate analysis of Texas jobs by a non-Perry supporter, see this article in Political Math.
[2] . Cameron Todd Willingham in 2004, jury convicted and sentenced to death for murdering his three children by setting a fire in his home. He was a violent criminal with numerous previous convictions. His appeals presented testimony by arson experts disputing the testimony of the prosecution’s arson experts. The crucial fact regarding his guilt for the jury, however, was not arson technicalities but that he made no effort to save his three babies, and ran out of the house to let them burn to death. His wife revealed just prior to his execution that he confessed his crime to her.