Rick Perry to Announce

Spokesman Mike Miner announced Thursday that Texas Governor Rick Perry will declare himself a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination at the RedState Gathering Saturday in Charleston, South Carolina. Ah, South Carolina: “too small for a republic, too large for an insane asylum.”

Perry could have announced this week and taken part in the Ames Iowa debates with eight other Republican candidates last night. Perhaps he was doing like his buddy Sarah Palin and avoiding those darn “gotcha questions.” Chances are that nobody in Charleston will be asking him about Texas-style crony capitalism, or the revolving door that sends top staffers out to become high-paid lobbyists and brings them back to the Governors office to write policy and legislation. There will be no questions about his crazy preacher friends such as Pastor John Hagee, who has made millions telling his flock to be friends of Israel, so that God can start a fire there that burns the whole world. Nobody will point out that Perry, who is so “Fed-up” with government, hasn’t had a job in the private sector since he sold Bibles as a student at Texas A&M forty years ago.

Is Perry for real, or maybe he just doesn’t want to go back to Haskell? He’s done well in government and is living high on the hog with his travel, $10,000 a month digs, and security detail. He may simply be enjoying the high life on what used to be called the “rubber chicken circuit” as some other candidates, declared or otherwise, are doing. Right-wing think tanks pay good these years, and there seems to be a ready if artificial market for books by “conservatives.” RedState.com owner Human Events Magazine’s Regnery Publishing, once publisher for Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, now sells millions of books by G. Gordon Liddy, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and Newt Gingrich, though I don’t know how many people read the stuff. Campaigning is a license to raise millions from wealthy companies and individuals, something Rick Perry has never had a problem with. Opportunities abound for some who know which side their bread is buttered on.