I was in Iowa at the end of last summer when everybody in Republican circles was positively sweating from their teeth for Governor Rick Perry of Texas to get into the presidential race. Then he got in and everybody noticed quite quickly that the man was even a bigger box of rocks than the last governor of Texas to run for president, and even the current Republican electorate realized that "Even Dumber Than George W. Bush" was no way to go through life, or the presidency, son, so Perry got to go back to Texas and be egregiously dumb there for a spell.

And you can't say the man didn't grasp the opportunity:

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Governor Goodhair continued today:

"We've got some of the finest health care in the world," he said. "So the idea that this federal government, which doesn't like Texas to begin with, to pick and choose and come up with some data and say somehow Texas has the worst health care system in the world is just fake and false on its face."

The federal government "doesn't like Texas to begin with." What are you, 14 years old? Are they not going to prom together this year? Maybe it's because 25 percent of Texans have no health insurance, and Rick Perry thinks this is "some of the finest health care in the world." By this standard, if I go to the Louvre and rip off the Mona Lisa, and then bury it in my backyard, then my neighborhood has "some of the finest artwork in the world."

The dunces seem to be in confederacy over this whole thing, and I mean Confederacy in the fullest historical meaning. Perry's always been an adherent of a crackpot theory regarding our old friend, The 10th Amendment. There even was a book written on the subject to which someone attached Perry's name. It was the basis for his triumphant presidential campaign. But various governors from the goggle-eyed homunculus in Wisconsin to Governor Bat Boy in Florida have decided to discreetly nullify some of the federal health-care statute that recently was held to be consitutitional. "Bobby" Jindal, the world's worst surrogate, also is on board.

Can we have a discussion now about how truly bad most of these guys are at their jobs?

Jindal's virtually handed over public education in Louisiana to charlatans and Christian nutballs. Scott Walker's going out marching in Fourth of July Parades wearing an American flag shirt made overseas a week after a Wisconsin company that makes American flags goes bankrupt. And Rick Scott is closing the hospital housing Florida's only tuberculosis treatment smack in the middle of the state's biggest tuberculosis outbreak in 20 years. And Rick Perry, who never met a big idea he wouldn't cover with barbecue sauce and try to eat, has decided that he will fight federal intervention in his state's ghastly health-care system by taking a stand that will guarantee that the federal government takes over even more of it.

Maybe if the federal government sent him some nice flowers on his birthday.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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