Rick Perry's Rock Blunder

Mike & Friends Blog

Dan Rackley

Dan Rackley is a US Naval veteran living in Philadelphia and a contributor to "Will They Ever Trust Us Again?"

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October 3rd, 2011 12:55 PM

If you’re going to run for president, you better make sure that everything bout you is squeaky clean. If it’s not squeaky clean, than you better make sure you tell everyone before they find out for themselves. It’s just like when you were a child and spilled something on the carpet. If you told your parents, they wouldn’t be nearly as mad if you told them with up front. Those lessons don’t change, even when you want to be a world leader. Just be up front with people, and the votes will eventually come your way.

For weeks now it seemed that Texas Governor Rick Perry has been an impregnable fortress. When Michelle Bachmann recently got on him in one of the debates about requiring all girls entering the 6^th grade to get the HPV vaccine, he was almost masterful in his rebuttal. He said quite simply, that any families that wanted to opt out of their kids getting the vaccine just had to fill out a small piece of paperwork.

Game, set and match for Perry on that one. Then he has stumbled a little bit calling Social Security nothing more than a Ponzi scheme. Since it is MLB Playoff time, I’ll just put this one in a baseball context. He fouled out on the first pitch with that one. The formerly insurmountable gap between him and his fellow GOP candidates grew narrower and narrower. Now he’s embroiled in a controversy that is probably going to sink him and fast.

Some time ago, his family bought a ranch in Texas for hunting. Ok, there’s nothing wrong with that. Lots of folks in Texas hunt. But here’s the big problem, when they bought the ranch there was a giant rock with a racial epithet painted on it. The Perry camp is saying that the offensive word was painted over some time in the early 80’s right after they bought the ranch. Some are even saying they saw the work still on the rock as recently as a few years ago.

This rock is going to sink Perry, if it already hasn’t. You can’t get away with everything. You bought a ranch that had a giant rock with N***erhead painted on it. You know, he could have really sent a message when he discovered this years ago. But instead of say, destroying the rock somehow, he just painted over it. Just like once the Civil Rights Act was passed and some people just painted over the “Colored” part of signs for restrooms and drinking fountains. Even if you did paint over the word, it was a halfway compliance with what is socially acceptable.

This is the kind of thing that alienates voters and in a big way. If he’s not sounding convincing on when he painted over a word on a rock, what else can we totally believe him on? And all he did was paint over it, nothing else. He didn’t get rid of the problem, he just tried to hide it. The fact that he even put money down on the ranch with something like that standing at the front gate is very telling anyway.