In which I endorse Rick Perry for President

Not that it matters much, or that he has much of a chance of winning.  However, he's the best choice on offer.  The reason is that he's the only one who plausibly will address the problem facing the Republic.  Via Foseti, Wikipedia explains it:

What we have in this country today, then, is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny—the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through "sensitivity training" and multiculturalist curricula, "hate crime" laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny.

Mitt Romney is a big government "fixer", which means that he instinctively reaches for the new regulation.  While I have a lot of admiration for Romney's personal life and personal morals, I have nothing but contempt for his what-do-you-like-I-like-that-too attitude towards governing.  I could easily see him bending to more of the "Domestic Terrorist" nonsense - or if he won't, he certainly has done nothing to convince me otherwise.  Quite frankly, the noise about how he's the only viable candidate is just that - noise.  It's the sound of the political elite trying to get a bandwagon rolling.  A moment's thought will dispel this as the mirage it is.

Newt Gengrich is without doubt the smartest man in the room (I'm not joking here), but the last three years have shown us the danger of electing a Professor-in-Chief.  Plus, he's clearly overly comfortable sitting on the sofa spouting support for what was even then clearly a dead program, so just how smart is he?  He said this was a mistake, but never said why he thought it was a good idea at the time.  Now, I like a lot of his ideas; the problem is that I don't know which of those he'd try to get implemented.  Given his unwillingness to explain the Nancy Pelosi thing, I suspect that I won't like the answer much.

R0n P4U1!!!!eleventy!!!! isn't just a kook, his response to the newsletter fiasco has turned a problem for his campaign into a disqualifying event.  He didn't know what was being published in his newsletter?  Oooooh kaaaay.  I don't think that he's a racist, I think that he thinks that I'm a dim bulb.  That expression of contempt for my intelligence is returned in equal measure.  Don't let it hit you in the ass on the way out, R0n.  He's simply dishonest and unwilling to take the heat, which means I don't want him anywhere near the Oval Office. 

I don't think that Michelle Bachman is crazy, but she's far too socially conservative for me.  Gay marriage is not the biggest crisis facing the Republic today, and so she's taking her eye off the ball.

The rest (Santorum?  Huntsman? Not even sure who's there or why) are rounding error.  They might make good Presidents, in some alternate universe where they break into double digits.  It's possible that I could reconsider one of these in the unlikely event that they show signs of being contenders.  But the first rule of getting elected is getting elected.  Not much to see here so far.

Which leaves Rick Perry.

He's not glib, although he does decently well with a Teleprompter.  People overly impressed with glibness will either vote for Obama anyway (Thomas Friedman), or will hold their noses and vote for him (Peggy Noonan).  In other words, this is irrelevant.  What is relevant is that he's the only candidate that's shown a long term instinct to resist the growing anarcho-tyranny of the current political elite.

The fact that the elite hate him is what the lawyers call admission against interest - we can infer the truth because it damages their case.

Ace makes a pretty good (and detailed) case for Perry:

But I don't want someone who is so confident that he is a more capable administrator of federal power. I want someone who is skeptical of federal power no matter who wields it, no matter how skilled and able an administrator he might be, even if that administrator is he himself, and so always prefers to shunt power away from the government to to the states, and their citizens.

Quite frankly, he's the only one with a record of walking this walk.  And this is the problem facing the Republic today - too much government, done in the interest of political lobbying, with government agencies writing thousands of new regulations in the interest of the special interests who have entirely captured those agencies.

At this point, I should confess that I don't much like Perry personally.  That doesn't matter.  He's the only one with his eye on the ball that actually counts.

UPDATE 28 December 2011 16:32: Via Hotair, here's Romney telling us that Massachusetts' RomneyCare was conservative, not liberal:



Presumably, that's why it's preferred 3:1 by those conservative Massachusetts voters.

He thinks that we're idiots, to swallow this drivel.  I'd like a higher caliber of drivel.

UPDATE 28 December 16:45: Ron Paul is crazy as a coot.  Foreign policy is messy, because international relations are chaotic.  The only way to interpret this is that we have no interests in the rest of the world.  Or he somehow thinks that his State Department will be staffed with Philosopher Kings, who won't make mistakes or fail to foresee what might happen twenty years down the road.



So what, I wonder, would be the unforeseen consequences (twenty years in the future) of withdrawing from the world?  Again, via Hotair.