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Clearing the Browser Tabs – Fast and Fibulous Wednesday Edition Posted: 19 Oct 2011 03:10 AM PDT I’m pretty sure President Obama’s pants were very quietly on fire in this interview with Jake Tapper. The President said a few things about Operation Fast and Furious that were outright deceptive. I got into the particulars and summed-up what we know of the investigation into a program that has caused the deaths of at least 202 people on The Delivery last night (show post will go up later today). Here’s the truth, folks. No one “screwed up” Operation Fast and Furious. It worked exactly as planned. If anything went amiss, it’s that the higher-ups in the BATFE couldn’t muzzle the field officers who blew the whistle on the administration’s deadly program. I’m going to need a little help from all of you in the show post later today to help me decide if a couple changes I’m considering to The Delivery are worth making (and, if they are, what they should be). Cryptic? All will be explained in the post. And now, links! If at some point in a speech, the President starts to yell “Bababooie”, we’ll know the motive behind this caper. Herman Cain is still playing far too loose with his public statements. I appreciates that he speaks his mind — I want more of that from politicians — but he needs to choke up just a little bit when he’s working on the margins of his comfort zone. As an example, he can not identify someone who coddles Castro and Chavez a “moderate”. Maybe if we ask nicely, Canada will give us our Tenth Amendment back. Israel has its kidnapped son back. I very much hope it does not cost them more innocent lives. I like the phrase “The Limbaugh Generation”. Bob Belvedere is not a Mitt Romney fan, with good reason. This John Nolte piece on how the MSM use the supposedly non-partisan “fact checkers” to make themselves look objective is your must-read article of the day. Okay, this is a rather cool space-based mystery. I suggest they check the immediate area for missing cows.

Is Rick Perry the Republican Ryan Leaf? Posted: 18 Oct 2011 01:35 PM PDT According to an anonymous source inside the Rick Perry campaign, we’re going to see a different man tonight. He’s going to be more active and more engaged. He’ll bring his electoral expertise to bear on hit less-experienced opponents. We’ll hear more about his energy plan and get a few hints about the other phases of his economic plan. He’ll position himself as the best person to pull the government off our throats and he’ll do it with the good humor, piercing wit, and swagger that Texans have seen from him for well over a decade. Or…he’ll complain that the other candidates are a bunch of big cheaterfaces and promise to cheat just as much as they have. “We’re going to pay a little less attention to the rules,” says a source in the Perry camp who asked to go unnamed.  “One of the things the governor tried to do in New Hampshire [at the Bloomberg/Washington Post debate] was to live by the time limits set by organizers.  No one else did.  As a result, one could view the governor’s performance as having less to say, when in fact he was simply trying to live up to the rules of the debate.  They’ve rarely been enforced, and we’re not going to pay much attention to them.” You know who else uses the “I would have won if the other guys hadn’t cheated so much” excuse? Losers. Rick Perry is very quickly turning into the Ryan Leaf of Presidential politics — the couldn’t-miss star who simply didn’t have the chops to make it in a tougher league and couldn’t find it in himself to adapt to a different game than he knew. For what it’s worth, I don’t think Perry lacks talent or ambition. He couldn’t have dominated Texas politics for a decade without ample supplies of either one. Clearly, though, he has a problem. His poll numbers have dropped like a brick wrapped in another brick wrapped in a dwarf star. In August, he was the clear front-runner and held a dominant lead. Today, he is in third place nationally and even lower in a couple early primary states. He has yet to land a real blow on Mitt Romney though he’s thrown a flurry of punches and, while he’s been doing that, Herman Cain has blown right past him. I’m going to toss out a theory I have about why Perry’s campaign is cratering even though, on paper, it shouldn’t be. Rick Perry doesn’t know how to campaign in a friendly primary. I’ve looked over his electoral record and, with the exception of his Gubernatorial primary against Kay Bailey Hutchison and Debra Medina, he hasn’t had to run against much Republican opposition. A primary requires a slightly different strategy than a general. A candidate can’t get as nasty with a fellow Republican as they can with a Democrat in the general because they can’t afford to alienate Republicans who will simply choose another Republican. In a general election, right-wing voters are trapped a bit by the lack of options — either vote for a Democrat (and usually a left-wing Democrat in national elections) or stay home. Perry has shown he has no problem going nasty in a primary and it’s cost him. His “no heart” description of those Republicans who disagree with his in-state tuition policy for illegal immigrants a couple of debates hurt him very badly. While he more or less apologized for “that word”, he never apologized for the belief that led to such a casual and callous dismissal of a rather large block of voters who would now rather chew off their own arms than vote for him in a primary. He can get away with that in a general election, where insulting staunch Democratc won’t cause your polls to plummet like a turkey in a Thanksgiving Day radio promotional stunt. In a primary? Well, you see what’s happened. The Presidential election is a new game for Perry and he has yet to realize it. He can’t get away with the cutthroat campaign style he used in Texas. He needs to play a different game and his  campaign’s anonymous whine about how his opponents are petty cheaters shows me he has no clue that the game has changed.

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