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" Rick Perry is stuck and he&amp;#039;s floundering, and he knows it. If he knows why he&amp;#039;s stuck and floundering remains an open question, but there&amp;#039;s some indication that he does. But Rick Perry&amp;#039;s candidacy is stuck up to its wheel-wells because he once did something decent for people unlike himself and, when challenged about it, on stage, by the rest of lightweights in his party, he told the truth. If you&amp;#039;re attempting to get the Republican party&amp;#039;s nomination for president of the United States in 2012 \u2014 or any time in the future, judging by the Triple-A Ostrogoths currently populating the country&amp;#039;s state legislatures \u2014 and if there is anything in your background that indicates that you were once decent to people unlike yourself, you should identify that problem immediately and then lie your ass off for the balance of your presidential campaign. By the way, have you met Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney? But Perry has never been accused to being the sharpest blade on the mower. (Didn&amp;#039;t he realize, as a career politician, that having kicked back at any time in your life at a hunting lodge called &amp;quot;Niggerhead&amp;quot; might cause a problem for him with any voter residing outside of Texas and within the 21st century? I mean, honestly.) So he gets up on a stage with the rest of the candidates and, when he is attacked for having done the fundamentally decent thing of allowing the children of undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition to Texas&amp;#039;s public universities, he defends himself and says that, if you don&amp;#039;t see it that way, you don&amp;#039;t have a heart. Alas, for Governor Goodhair \u2014 we&amp;#039;re keeping it alive, Molly \u2014 truth is contraindicated while discussing decency in public policy, at least among the Republican elite, and Perry&amp;#039;s campaign immediately went into political anaphylaxis. Perry can&amp;#039;t find a way out now. Although, Lord knows, he&amp;#039;s trying. This weekend, in New Hampshire, he professed himself &amp;quot;open to the idea&amp;quot; of sending U.S. troops into Mexico to combat drug-related violence before it spills across the border. He also was not entirely sure he&amp;#039;d tell the government of Mexico before he did it. This is perhaps the worst idea of the campaign season. It is perhaps the worst idea of any campaign season in the last 100 years. If you throw in that part about (maybe) not telling Mexico in advance, it might just be the stupidest fucking idea pronounced in public by any politician since Pericles. Just for fun, let&amp;#039;s go back to a previous Republican presidential contender&amp;#039;s thoughts on sending the U.S. Army down to meddle in Mexico: That originally having some strong motive \u2014 what, I will not stop now to give my opinion concerning \u2014 to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory \u2014 that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood \u2014 that serpent&amp;#039;s eye, that charms to destroy he plunged into it, and has swept, on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself, he knows not where.  But, then again, Abraham Lincoln would have finished somewhere on the distant borders of the Duchy of Grand Gingrich in the Florida Straw Poll, so what would he know about it, anyway? Why, you might ask, as embattled as he is, did Rick Perry decide to attach himself to the worst idea in the history of campaigns? Because he once did something decent in his career, and then he had the temerity to speak honestly in its defense, that&amp;#039;s why. The simple fact is that it&amp;#039;s not &amp;quot;the immigration issue&amp;quot; that&amp;#039;s doing in Rick Perry. This whole thing isn&amp;#039;t about Irish housepainters in Dorchester, or even about Russian mobsters in Brighton Beach. When he was governor of Texas, Rick Perry gave in-state tuition to the children of immigrants whose skins were brown. When called upon it, he told the people who were angry about what he&amp;#039;d done that they lacked a &amp;quot;heart,&amp;quot; perhaps without knowing that, at the heart of the party he seeks to lead, the people to whom he&amp;#039;d given that break are not viewed as people, apparently, but things \u2014 illegals.&amp;quot; The question of heart doesn&amp;#039;t enter into it because the people in question are unworthy of empathy from those pale Christian souls who vote in Republican primaries. If Perry ever doubted this, he didn&amp;#039;t have to wait long to be convinced. Never one to be subtle when he could be utterly unprincipled, Mitt Romney attacked Perry on the issue with a stupendously vile ad that made the old Frito Bandito commercials sound like they&amp;#039;d been written by Carlos Fuentes:      (And, yes, this is the same Mitt Romney who used to have undocumented immigrants mowing the lawn of the family manse back in Massachusetts. And your point is?)  I have no doubt that, somewhere in the brain trust of the Perry campaign, some bright young person pointed out that they were being Latino&amp;#039;d to death out there and that it was time to get tough on the Mexicans. So, off goes Goodhair to New Hampshire to announce that he&amp;#039;s Winfield Scott and that we might have to shell Vera Cruz again. Unfortunately, given the nature of his party, and the hole he&amp;#039;s dug for himself by first being decent and then being truthful, Perry might have to storm the ramparts of Chapultepec himself before GOP voters ever forgive him. This is now a party of pure Id. It&amp;#039;s been building toward that for almost 50 years now. It began the trek as the party that absorbed the remnants of white supremacy and that employed (to considerable effect) the political energy of white reaction to the triumphs of the Civil Rights movement. Through the years, it absorbed into itself reactionary religion and a modern partisan media, but the basic template always has been that which was constructed when, as Lyndon Johnson predicted, white Southerners fled the Democratic party in the mid-1960&amp;#039;s. By the time it elected Richard Nixon in 1968, it already had become the embodiment of organized resentment, Nixon being the perfect embodiment all by himself. Ronald Reagan&amp;#039;s political career was born in that resentment. He stoked it as governor of California, and as a candidate for president in 1980. No soft-focus CNN feature about avuncular old Dutch should trump the bullshit about the welfare queens buying Cadillacs, and young bucks buying steaks, and that 1980 campaign kickoff not 10 miles away from the dam out of which the dug the bodies of Michael Schwerner, Andy Goodman, and James Chaney. Reagan knew his audience, and he played to it. Now, that Id is all the party has left, and, as its intellectual life shrinks, it becomes more rigidly orthodox. There&amp;#039;s little room left in which candidates can maneuver. There is no issue the party engages that is not broken down to the embattled Us, and the overwhelming, privileged Them. Poor people are also &amp;quot;elitists.&amp;quot; Rick Perry gave a crumb to Them without asking Us. And then he implied that, maybe, They should be seen as worthy of the crumb he gave them, thereby engaging what 23 percent of the party might recognize as that vestigial impulse known as a conscience. How dare he anyway?  There is a way out, of course. And, in Sunday&amp;#039;s New York Times, columnist Ross Douthat found himself questing after unicorns: But amid the bombast and identity politics, it&amp;#039;s still possible to discern a serious populist critique of how the Republican establishment does business \u2014 one that links Pat Buchanan&amp;#039;s primary campaigns in the 1990s to figures like Palin, Huckabee, Cain and Ron Paul today. This critique accuses the Republican leadership of being too cavalier about illegal immigration, too forgiving of crony capitalism and Wall Street-Washington coziness, too promiscuous with overseas military interventions, and too willing to imitate Democrats and centralize power in Washington. Right-wing populists tend to argue that Beltway Republicans have lost touch with the party&amp;#039;s core constituencies: small-business owners, middle-class families and Main Street, U.S.A.  Honest to god, I am moved by the childlike yearning in that passage. Truly, I am. First of all, Pat Buchanan has been a public bigot and an obvious anti-Semite since he was writing segregationist editorials in St. Louis. His biggest problem with Wall Street is that there are so many Jews working there. He led no movement. He led a doomed and destructive uprising against Daddy Bush because the latter made a deal that partly rescued the economy. Palin&amp;#039;s not running, and never will, and is an unpopular fool besides. Huckabee was Herman Cain four years ago, and somebody else will be Herman Cain in 2016. Ron Paul is the sole occupant of his own universe. To see a coherent &amp;quot;populist&amp;quot; movement in this collection of cranks and stooges is to hear an oratorio in a flock of crows. There&amp;#039;s a reason why Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee aren&amp;#039;t down on Wall Street right now, chatting up the demonstrators. There simply is nobody in the Republican party, now or in the future, who&amp;#039;s going to run for president by ripping his party &amp;quot;for being too forgiving of crony capitalism and Wall Street-Washington coziness.&amp;quot; Hell, there are practically no Democrats who would run on that platform. But the Republicans will never do it because they fundamentally don&amp;#039;t believe in the obvious solution \u2014 which is to re-regulate the casino before it breaks us all again. Every single one of the Republican candidates for president is on record as being opposed to even the relatively mild regulatory regime of the Dodd-Frank bill. Unfortunately for Douthat, his dream of an opposition to crony capitalism runs headlong into that business about the inherent distrust his populism has for centralized power in Washington. Boom. Splat. And if Douthat can identify an antiwar Republican of any real national stature since the death of George Aiken, he&amp;#039;s a better man than I. And, no, Ron Paul doesn&amp;#039;t count. Among his tenets of the new conservative populism, then, the only thing that has a snowball&amp;#039;s chance in Juarez of actually happening is an attack on &amp;quot;the Republican leadership for being too cavalier about illegal immigration,&amp;quot; which is pretty much where we \u2014 and poor Rick Perry \u2014 came in. Alas for him, the party&amp;#039;s actual &amp;quot;core constituencies&amp;quot; \u2014 bigots, religious fanatics, the alienated mal-informed, and the multibillionaires who exploit them \u2014 are locked in a symbiotic relationship that shows no sign of abating. It&amp;#039;s the latter group who gets &amp;quot;small-business owners, middle-class families, and Main Street, U.S.A.&amp;quot; all ginned-up. The multibillionaires then rig the game so that the small businesses go under, the middle-class families get swindled out of their homes, and Main Street, U.S.A. is lined with empty blank-staring buildings, the only light in their windows being the cookstoves in the meth labs. As for &amp;quot;promiscuous overseas military interventions,&amp;quot; well, technically, Mexico isn&amp;#039;t overseas. Maybe Rick Perry&amp;#039;s got a shot, after all. Follow Charles P. Pierce on The Politics Blog, on RSS and the Twitter &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a11117/rick-perry-immigration-6503697/>