Twitter — @kat_deville

WTF Friday: Perryception

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Above: Stare into the Oops, and the Oops stares also into you.

Our great state’s recent surge of OTM UACs—that’s Other Than Mexican Unaccompanied Alien Children, in the lovely, humanizing vernacular of our Border Patrol—has thrown our great state into disarray. We face a moral crisis, and the future of millions is at stake. Trapped by circumstances that cannot be controlled, thrown into the lion’s den of public attention, the subject of this crisis desperately tries to be recognized as human while navigating a system seemingly beyond his understanding. I’m talking, of course, about Rick Perry.

1) Rick Perry would like to be president. Did you know this? For much of the last week, he’s been determined to show how very serious he is about cracking down on the flood of refugee children, and by showing how very, very serious he is, so serious that he will very often be frowning in the relevant pictures, he will show how unserious people from Washington, D.C. are. In 2014, this is as good a way as any to win the Republican nomination for president.

As a way of showing how serious he is, Perry spent much of the last two weeks arguing with Obama about how and when he would meet with POTUS to have his picture taken, where he would be sure to look very serious and grave. After a lengthy bout of sparring over the photo op, during which Perry accused Obama many times of not taking the crisis seriously, at least, not seriously enough to do a photo op with Perry on his terms, Obama consented to meet briefly with Perry and a number of local elected officials, in what appears to be the fallout bunker of an airport-adjacent Radisson. During the meeting Perry frowned, and the rest is history.

Perhaps unhappy to have been taken un-seriously when he had hoped to be taken seriously, Perry donned Terminator sunglasses and body armor and went on a pleasure cruise with Sean Hannity along the Rio Grande. Surely he would be taken seriously here. This was, after all, a boat with machine guns, which are very cool, very serious and very masculine. Here was the solution to the crisis: These rad machine guns could make short work of the teen refugees.

Unfortunately, in much of the reporting, Perry was upstaged by the boat.

“The Texas boats looked badass,” one law enforcement officer told The Blaze.

Despite his social media travails, Perry won the crisis. In fact, you could say that nothing has been better for his presidential hopes than the sudden arrival of tens of thousands of afraid, abused, and disoriented Central American teenagers. We know this because of the verdict rendered by BuzzFeed. Their writeup of the last few days was called “Republicans Are Super Excited Rick Perry Is Back,” and its subhed was: “The border crisis is giving the Texas governor the chance to look serious.”

The thousands of undocumented immigrants crossing into the United States in recent months, and Perry’s perch as the top executive in Texas, have given him the opportunity to be out in front on an issue he knows well: the border.

Several people close to Perry insist his response to the border crisis involves no political calculation at all, and that he would be doing the exact same things were he not seriously toying with a 2016 run.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ok man!

2) In the race to replace Rick, it was the best of times and the worst of times. Wendy Davis and Greg Abbott stumbled into an actual issue to fight about for the first time in a while—whether or not the placement of dangerous chemical stockpiles should be on the public record. As an issue, it’s not, you know, health care or immigration or education, but after the ammonium nitrate explosion in West leveled half a town, that seems important.

As attorney general, Abbott acted to hide that information from the public, then issues a series of increasingly hilarious proclamations about why it wasn’t a big deal. Flustered, he finally came up with a reason:

Yes, terrorism. He’s the only one fighting it, while Davis stands aside, ladylike. Does Davis support terrorism? We can’t be sure. You may object that there has been a relative paucity of terrorist attacks in Texas lately, and a number of actual chemical disasters, but the absence of evidence, of course, is not evidence of absence. If the al-Dawlah al-Islāmīyah fī al-ʻIrāq wa-al-Shām start throwing around pipe bombs near the Houston Ship Channel, you’ll sorely regret your cynicism on this point.

Abbott ends his editorial in the San Antonio Express-News by urging Texans to do “all we can to protect the memories of the men and women who died in West.” A noble sentiment! Abbott, in his own unique way, is fulfilling that civic responsibility by making sure the victims of the next chemical disaster are less aware of the thing that will kill them. Thanks, Greg!

Of course, in the interest of fair reporting, I feel I must disclose that this is not the first time that Davis has been accused of palling around with terrorists.

3) Abbott wasn’t the only gubernatorial candidate campaigning gubernatorially this week: Davis also did that. Are you on the Davis campaign’s mailing list? You have never received email until you’ve received email from the Davis campaign. Like arrows from an infinite army of political communications majors, so numerous are they that they block out the sun, forcing reporters to write in the shade.

With so many of them, it’s understandable that a few of them fall short of hard-hitting indictments of the status quo. This week, the Davis campaign hit Abbott over the failure of Texas to win … the 2016 Republican National Convention, which had named Dallas as a finalist.

Fort Worth- Today, Davis campaign spokesman Zac Petkanas issued the following statement:

“A major role of the governor is to attract conventions, tourism and business to the state of Texas in order to create good paying jobs and boost the economy. Despite his begging, Greg Abbott was unable to deliver the Republican National Convention to Dallas. It’s unfortunate because this is one of Greg Abbott’s insider backroom deals Texas families could have really used.”

Set aside the fact that this is a weird thing to pin on Abbott, and the idea that the Davis campaign is sanctifying Perry’s approach to the governorship as Texas’ concierge, and the idea that Abbott is bad because he’s not enough of an insider.

It’s certainly true that a major convention would have boosted Dallas’ economy, but I find myself wondering about these “Texas families” who were pining away for the national GOP convention. Are they traveling political button-sellers? Do they enjoy terrible traffic? Is proximity to national politicians the unstable emotional foundation of their family units? I feel like they have deeper problems—problems that the convention alone can’t fix. Spare a moment in your thoughts for the Metroplex sons and daughters whose parents were hoping to keep it together long enough to see Marco Rubio do a meet-and-greet in Deep Ellum.