Granted, Rick Perry-the Texas governor who has lately been talking up the virtues of economic self-sufficiency and secession-sounds like an idiot. But given the current state of the Republican Party, what he’s doing is actually pretty smart.
Sure, it’s easy to ridicule Mr. Perry’s irrational and over-the-top pronouncements. And it’s just as easy to laugh at his extraordinary hypocrisy, as Mr. Perry–the same governor who had stoked secession fervor at a “tea party” rally in San Antonio just days earlier–asked the federal government to supply his state with hundreds of thousands of doses of Tamiflu so that his administration could combat any Swine Flu outbreak.
