Jim Hightower on Rick Perry

With Perry, you get the two basic political strains of today's Republican Party in one suit. On the one hand, he has carefully posed himself in the past couple of years as the farthest out of Tea Party Republican's far-out right-wingers. Think Michele Bachman with better hair: Perry called the BP oil disaster an "act of God." His response to the drought that's devastating Texas was to pray for rain (God did not oblige). He's a "tenther" who angrily asserted state's rights to nullify Obama's "socialist" schemes (until he needed federal cash to fix his state's bankrupt unemployment fund). He hates government-financed health care -- except for himself and his family. He loudly decries big government intrusion into people's lives, but enacted a law this year to require any woman considering an abortion to have a grossly-invasive probe inserted up her uterus to make her see a sonogram of the embryo. If elected, he would also try to scuttle Social Security, Medicaid and the federal income tax. All this, he warns, or else Texas might secede from the Union -- an idea lustily applauded by the other 49 states.