My,Your and Our Rick Perry Problem

[megimoo]

Texas governor Rick Perry is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination now, at least in the national polls...... Undoubtedly that’s the main reason so many East Coast pundits and Beltway wags are making fun of him. He likes guns! He’s from Texas! He talks funny! He’s a — gird yourself now — Christian!

New York magazine and others mock his harmless, Bush-like pronunciation of nuclear (“nuke-ular”).
They’re scandalized that he doesn’t go to a golf course to relax, but a shooting range. It’s already a cliché among liberals to describe him as the sort of cartoonish, ignorant cowboy they thought George W. Bush was (though to date, nobody feels the need to apologize to Bush for misinterpreting him).

And before we bust out the world’s smallest violin — or, I guess, the world’s smallest fiddle — to play the world’s softest sob-song for poor Rick Perry, keep in mind that he plays this game too. When asked to explain the difference between himself and Bush, Perry responded that Bush went to Yale, while he went to Texas A&M.....“In other words,” joked Conan O’Brien, “Rick Perry’s idea of instilling confidence is to say, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not as smart as George W. Bush.’”

Rick Perry’s overt Christianity horrifies many of his liberal critics. Bill Keller, the outgoing editor of the New York Times, agonized recently that “Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are all affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity.” Actually, Santorum is a fairly famous Catholic, but that’s tomaytoh, tomahto for Keller, apparently.

“Every faith,” Keller writes, “has its baggage, and every faith holds beliefs that will seem bizarre to outsiders. I grew up believing that a priest could turn a bread wafer into the actual flesh of Christ.”

I hope his current priest doesn’t mind when he calls Holy Communion “baggage.”



http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...onah-goldberg#

[wwworkingguy]

My stockbroker told me that he is "dangerous". I didn't get into discussing the reasons he felt that way but it may be because of Perry's connections to some radical Christian groups or things Perry has said, like the time he threatened that Texas may seek secession.

[Novaheart]

I am less concerned with someone whom I feel has inexplicable but sincere religious beliefs than I am with someone whom I feel has joined some strange cult-amalgam of religion + money + politics.

There is cast of political tribute rather than faith which surrounds the "C Street" cult. It seems to be like a monster with tiny but powerful and far reaching tentacles.

Even more disappointing, is that right-of mainstream religious people only need to hear "Christian" pronounced in that special Smokey Mountain way to give their trust to these people. These people are more similar to Opus Dei and any Masonic and/or Jewish conspiracy you may hold than to your average hard working rural Christian. They are conspirators after money and power, not charity and redemption.

Beware.