rick perry's texas goes national

remember michael dukakis' "Massachusetts miracle"? all it took was a willie horton ad to undo that message.

now comes rick perry, the guy who wrought the "texas miracle" of economic prosperity for those who are prospering, while the less said about anyone else, the better!

yet, there's the unseen other part of the texas story that will be reported but not matter. perry is a winner, and that pretty much negates anything you might find to the contrary:

Poverty grows in Rick Perry's Texas - Sep. 18, 2011: "And being poor in Texas isn't easy. The state has one of the lowest rates of spending on its citizens per capita and the highest share of those lacking health insurance. It doesn't provide a lot of support services to those in need: Relatively few collect food stamps and qualifying for cash assistance is particularly tough.
"There are two tiers in Texas," said Miguel Ferguson, associate professor of social work at University of Texas at Austin. "There are parts of Texas that are doing well. And there is a tremendous number of Texans, more than Perry has ever wanted to acknowledge, that are doing very, very poorly."
A combination of demographic and economic factors contribute to the high poverty rate in Texas, where many families, particularly in the southern swath, live in ramshackle housing with no utilities or indoor plumbing."

i'm sure that living in a shack without indoor plumbing is an existence that most prospective perry voters haven't seriously considered for themselves. the US people have an amazing knack for projecting those kinds of circumstances to other people -- and definitely not for themselves.

at the same time, so many of us are but a major crisis or two away from living in abject poverty. during the "recovery" we've allegedly been experiencing, no one but the affluent has really prospered, while the rest are basically treading water, trying to stay afloat.

these are exactly the same ones who'll buy the smooth pitch of the greasy, snake-oil peddling perry, with his promises of painless prosperity, if we just let the "job creators" have every impediment to their own prosperity removed. people will swoon over the thought of billionaires handing out good-paying jobs to every redneck yahoo who votes for the GOP. it's jesus' way of saying thank you for your support!