The Raw and The Cooked

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

AUSTIN, Texas - Never mind Michele Bachmann. She's gone. Same for Herman Cain and Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich. Jon Huntsman may be positioning himself for the vice-presidency. while Ron Paul may be on the next capsule to the moon.

It's all about Mitt Romney and Rick Perry now.

Last night's Republican Party debate at the Reagan Library in California did one thing: it winnowed the field of crazies seeking the GOP's 2012 presidential nomination. Only one other Republican personality can turn this into a bigger circus: the Alaskan hillbilly Sarah Palin. She wasn't there last night and rumors had it she was over at Reagan's gravesite, seeking advice on how to go forward with her Pollyanna act.

For now, Mitt Romney has the savage-minded Perry to deal with.

And while adulterer Newt Gingrich dreamed of asking the press to quit asking questions simply to make Republicans fight each other, Romney sandbagged Perry at every opportunity.

"It is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years today you're paying into a program that's going to be there," Perry said perhaps too-boldly about the nation's Social Security program. "Anybody that's for the status quo with Social Security today is involved with a monstrous lie to our kids, and it's not right."

Romney let go with a line that seemed to have been written much earlier and had been rehearsed for hours over in Hollywood. He said: "You can't say that to tens of millions of Americans who live on Social Security and those who have lived on it. Our nominee has to be someone who…isn't committed to abolishing Social Security, but who is committed to saving Social Security."

At that, Perry could only smirk the hundredth of such smirks he offered a gathering of fat Republicans seated under the shadow of a ridiculous jetliner viewers were told had once served as Air Force One for the peripatetic Reagan. The Texas governor, who had a day earlier been to the scene of raging wildfires in the Lone Star State's Bastrop County, seemed at ease in sparring with the former Massachusetts governor he has quickly replaced as his party's frontrunner for the nomination.

Much work is left, but it was a hot-cold beginning for the glib Perry.

He may not believe in science as it relates to global warming and he may wish to bring sleepless nights for the millions of Americans who need and receive their monthly social security checks, but if last night's performance is any indication, Perry will likely not back down from those two positions. Taking on seniors may not work for him, however. Perry has to go through Florida to win the nomination, and that Ponzi thing will not work there.

In rapid fashion, he has accused the director of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, of being a major part of the country's lousy economy and suggested Bernanke would be whipped silly in Texas and now he has said the Social Security Administration is a criminal operation (Charles Ponzi was a Boston criminal who defrauded his investor clients in the same manner that Bernard Madoff later took his investment ruse of paying clients with new-investor funds to much higher levels, leading to stunning rip-offs and his eventual recent arrest).

American voters seem to be ready for change. President Barack Obama, a Democrat elected in 2008, will address the country's horrendous unemployment problem in a speech scheduled for tonight ahead of the Packers-Saints NFL tussle in Green Bay. Noise is coming at him from every corner of the ragged Republican world and he can only hope that Rick Perry's campaign will eventually be as hollow as the gutted Boeing 707 jet hanging from the ceiling of that gaudy Reagan Library.

Most pundits gauging this first GOP debate awarded Perry a passing grade, while others said his brash words against Social Security and against science largely dooms him with the general election voters. Perry, after all, could only muster a D in economics while at Texas A&M, his graduation marred by the fact that his 2.1 Grade Point Average barely got him his degree in Animal Science - ironic in that he seems to have it for science in general.

Is he up for the grueling haul that is a party presidential nomination?

Who knows?

He got a C in gym class...

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