A Bum Took My Place...

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

AUSTIN, Texas - The first frame of the Republican Party's Election 2010 photo album has been shot and pasted on the page. It's a doozy in full color, but it's just the first of many. There will be a mountain of others coming during the next year. Michele Bachmann is hot right now, having bought & won the Iowa Straw Poll this last weekend. And, by looking at this seemingly ever-victorious photography, you'd think the GOP likely believes it has a chance against sitting President Barack Obama.

Not these rubes.

Republicans again are like blackbirds in this movie, flying from this powerline to the next one, wooing voters right and far right. There'll be grand ascendings and high hopes before the fall for Bachmann and her party opponents, one Mitt Romney and one Rick Perry and one Ron Paul. Those are the three legitimate contenders for the party nomination, which is still long, long political months ahead. Anything can happen from here on out. Early betting has Romney ahead of the rabid pack, with Perry snapping at his heels and the joke Bachmann somehow still believing she has a shot at the White House. As Adam told Lilith in the Garden of Eden before Eve's arrival on the scene, "It ain't gonna happen, Baby."

Photographs tend to gain interest and then they tend to be discarded in favor of new ones. That photo atop this story is yours truly during one of my recent sojourns to New York. It seemed fitting. I was in a New York groove back then. But memory of the trip faded and the new image is of me moving across Rural Texas in search of the perfect country & western taco joint. Life is funny that way. You come and you go. So don't worry about America and the threats that are all of these hollow Republicans. They'll go the way of the hula hoop and Bugler and Western Auto and The Animals. Adios, boys and girls.

That celebratory music coming from Rick Perry's camp is nothing but crack-fed noise. His minions and backers fully believe he, too, has a chance at posturing up against Obama. That, I know, would be both enlightening and hilarious. Perry versus Obama is Jerry Quarry versus Muhammad Ali: no contest. Stop the bleeding and then stop the fight. Perry, the Texas governor and graduate of Texas A&M, majored in Animal Science, but got a D in Feeds & Feedings (stuff you feed farm animals, and how you do it). He managed a C in U.S. History and a D in a course listed as Meats, one of his Animal Science classes.

According to his widely-published college transcript, Perry left A&M with only 2 A's (Improv. of Learning and Military Science), 20 B's, 27 C's, nine D's and an F in Organic Chemistry. His final Grade Point Average barely met graduation requirements.

This is the same Perry who will take on Harvard-educated President Obama?

In his brief tussle with Ali, boxer Jerry Quarry looked pathetic after the first three punches, his face and head heading for the canvas soon after that. The same fate awaits Mssr. Perry, a man who told voters when he ran for re-election in 2010 that he had no interest in higher office and that he would serve out his term. He lied. He won't. While campaigning during the next year-and-a-half, Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst will take the reins of the cash-strapped, runaway chuckwagon known as the Lone Star State. Perry'll be Sarah Palining, preening as if some real idea-man, as if some late-arriving savior, as if some sentient nouveau cheerleader. The title of president on him would be so diminished as to be made irrelvant by this man. He is no George W. Bush, and that spells danger.

Yes, sir, photographs are both funny and telling.

The nattily-attired Perry's early campaign photos have him looking like some rodeo cowboy who was plucked from the smelly bunkhouse for some promotional shot needed ahead of the annual rural pig fair. He's dressed, but looks like he really has no idea where he's going. That's about all any half-intelligent wit can take out of his cornpone smiling and his ill-at-ease posturing.

I wasn't feeling all that cool when my photograph was taken outside that bar in New York. I'd been walking all damned day and my feet were tired. But you'd never get that from the photo...

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