It’s a small shot, but a taste of things to come from the New York Times and the rest of the complicit media. You can see it in the headline:
In Texas, Perry Has Ridden an Energy Boom
The Texas economy? It’s just oil. Those OPEC thieves raise the prices, and Rick Perry looks like an evil geeeeeeeeeeeenius. Of course, the best they can do is quote a confessed Perry critic:
But some economists as well as Perry skeptics suggest that Mr. Perry stumbled into the Texas miracle. They say that the governor has essentially put Texas on autopilot for 11 years, and it was the state’s oil and gas boom — not his political leadership — that kept the state afloat. They also doubt that the Texas model, regardless of Mr. Perry’s role in shaping it, could be effectively applied to the nation’s far more complex economic problems.
“Because the Texas economy has been prosperous during his tenure as governor, he has not had to make the draconian choices that one would have to make in the White House,” said Bryan W. Brown, chairman of the Rice University economics department and a critic of Mr. Perry’s economic record. “We have no idea how he would perform when he has to make calls for the entire country.”
The very next line is a real winner:
And if Mr. Perry were to win the Republican nomination, he would face critics, among them Democrats…
Democrats would say bad things about the GOP candidate? Stop the presses!
But it isn’t just Democrats and critics. Oh, no. It’s also liberal research groups:
“The Texas model can’t be the blueprint for the United States to successfully compete in the 21st-century economy, where you need a well-educated work force,” said Dick Lavine, senior fiscal analyst at the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin-based liberal research group.
Krause then goes on to quote some nice conservatives saying some nice things about Perry — all of them just as “newsworthy” as the ones I clipped for you above. And then Krause gets right back to the punches:
When Mr. Perry succeeded Mr. Bush, a barrel of oil was worth only $25. Experts warned that Texas’s natural gas and oil fields, which directly and indirectly support about one-third of the state’s jobs, were in steep decline. But during his first term, global market forces began driving oil prices up. They peaked at $147 a barrel in 2008 and have largely remained above $80 over the last two years.
Left unasked: How Texas manages to keep its energy economy humming, with a spiteful White House and a hateful EPA monkeywrenching all the gears. Krause, via Bernard L. Weinstein, even makes the claim that recent advances are just luck:
“He’s been lucky,” said Bernard L. Weinstein, associate director of the McGuire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “Obviously, neither the governor nor public policy in Texas has pushed oil prices up, and clearly the technological innovation has created a whole new industry in Texas.”
Where did those “technological innovations” come from? For New York Times readers, they just happen. But the fact is, innovation occurs in a kind of leave-it-alone economy. Texas, to the extent Washington allows it, has enjoyed just that kind of freedom.
I guess that’s just Rick Perry’s “good luck.”
UPDATE: How did I miss this the first time around? Look at the picture the NYT chose to illustrate the story, just below the headline.
It’s a month old — and Perry has done one or two things in the last couple weeks that might be more newsworthy than a news conference that the NYT couldn’t even determine what it was about. And, of course, it features that lucky braggart watching himself play football.
MORE: At The Atlantic, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend asks “is Rick Perry as Christian as he thinks he is?” That’s her big question in an article where she also reminds us that “the Bible is certainly open to interpretation,” and that “no one has a monopoly on faith.”
“Cognitive dissonance” must not have much meaning to Kathleen. Or “irony.”
“Because the Texas economy has been prosperous during his tenure as governor, he has not had to make the draconian choices that one would have to make in the White House,”
In other news, crime rates down despite prison overcrowding.
Lessee…
What’s another state with oil…???
OH, YEAH. Kulhifornia…!!! How’re they doin’…???
Yep. They are trying out a narrative. “He’s just lucky.”
ME: “Okay, then. I guess Barry is “just unlucky”. I’ll take lucky over unlucky.”
THEM: “No, no, you don’t understand. It won’t work at the national level!”
ME: “Really? Isn’t TX a huge chunk of the country and the national economy? Do you hear yourself?”
These guys really do get phone calls from the DNC, telling them what the narrative should be. They really are the propaganda arm of the DNC. If they were not, we would see different kinds of articles going after Perry on any number of things. Instead, we see all these similar articles. “The dog didn’t bark.” It’s what didn’t happen.
Of course not, they never listen to themselves. Why give up the element of surprise?
The oil line would make fabulous sense if all the jobs in Texas were a result of oil. Of course, that doesn’t explain all the Fortune 500 companies that have nothing to do with oil packing up and moving here. Nor does it explain Facebook opening an office here, or EA Sports or dozens of other companies that have absolutely nothing to do with the energy industry.
And, of course, let’s not forget that Texas does not have a monopoly on energy production/oil/gas, yet somehow we are doing a much better job of getting to the oil/gas/energy than our surrounding neighbors… couldn’t possibly be because our state encourages companies to come here and do things like look for oil and gas, then allow them to you know…. actually drill for the oil they’ve found? Or build those funny looking windmills to generate electricity.
No sirree!! All just dumb luck. I’m so glad I live in such lucky state!
We could use a lucky President long about now.
I love Texas. It’s just the damn Dallas Cowboys I can’t stand! Nice post, and completely true. Go Skins
Wasn’t it Jefferson who said: “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”
Or, perhaps Seneca would be more appropriate: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
– Robert Heinlein (h/t Ed Driscoll)
You can almost FEEL the anticipatory joy of the “compliant media” (great term) now that Perry is in the race. Here’s something that will provide some real red meat. A Texas governor and very public Christian. You can sense the presence of the pack forming before lauching it’s attack.
t”he Bible is certainly open to interpretation” … “no one has a monopoly on faith” – these are the kinds of things that incoming college freshmen say to sound like they’re all smart.
I find it self serving and ridiculous that the media would use someones faith as a question mark for his suitability to serve office. The media is just throwing mud at a wall to see what sticks. Seems to me, JFK was a Catholic, eh?
It is early yet and yes, I am sure we shall see even more silliness and just profane acts from newest arm of the DNC..
I find it interesting that the news media would first choose to question Perry’s “faith” then his being just “lucky”. Secondly, they are now saying he should thank Obama for the stimulus money received and contributed to the job creation in Texas, not Perry’s steady hand.
When you look at the distribution of stimulus money per capita, TX is well in the middle of the pack with states like CA, OR, WA, NY and RI getting more. One only has to ask what shape they are in..
If KKT had two brain cells, they’d fight.
Here’s another line of attack that showed up in my Facebook feed:
A Christian Plot for Domination?
http://www.thedailybeast.com
Bachmann and Perry share ties to Dominionism, which says Christians should rule. By Michelle Goldberg.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/14/dominionism-michele-bachmann-and-rick-perry-s-dangerous-religious-bond.html
Good grief, they’re dragging that out of the anxiety closet again?!
Lefties tried to hang the dominionist/reconstructionist label on W in 2004 or so … Stanley Kurtz had a couple posts on NRO’s Corner about it. Didn’t work then, either.
My mistake, it was after his re-election:
http://old.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200505020944.asp
Wow. Pretty much word for word the same tripe thrown at Perry.
The internet is forever, my friends…
The truly odd thing is, if they’re raising questions about Perry’s faith 15 months out, what happens a year from now if Mitt Romneycare is the nominee?
{rolls eyes} Yes, because a liberal Republican who created RomneyCare while strenuously distancing himself from Reagan at the time is the best choice for the Tea Party movement.
Romney is also ObamaLite® because he is as much a chameleon as TROTUS.
That said, your point is correct. IIRC Stephen has already posted on the ground work the White House has been laying for exactly that outcome.
Oh, if the GOP screwed up totally and nominated Jim Jeffords, Arlen Specter or Michael Bloomberg to run against Obama, the Kneepad Media would find a way to depict said GOP nominee as the Second Coming of Mussolini.
They don’t care how big of a stretch their attacks have to be — in fact I suspect they prefer to have to put some extra thought and skill into them, since that way the outcome of the election doesn’t matter so much.
Let’s not forget that the Texas energy economy is not limited to Oil & Gas. Texas generates more electricity from wind power than any other state, more than three times that of any other state, approximately a third of residential power usage is from wind. How does one “luck” into seeing the future of sustainable energy and building a massive industry around long before President Obama started handing out green subsidies?
Meanwhile, Bad Luck Barry’s Blunder Bus Tour rolls over America…
“Lincoln,” the president said today in Iowa, “they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me.”
Um…no, tender little narcissist…
They used to caricature Lincoln as an ape and a chimp (sound familiar), and hang him in effigy.
(That would be Democrats, btw).
Poor little Bad Luck Barry…he is entering the “self-pity” phase of his disease.
Everyone’s cogent points about wind power aside (I love that they often sit on top of oil wells), my favorite part of the article is the delicious irony that the individual decrying the lack of well-educated workforce was working at a think-tank in AUSTIN.
The big cities of Texas are our “Blue Zones”, especially Austin. So the media will have no trouble finding critics of Perry. He has had some screw ups over the years, but nothing bad enough to stop his reelection. All that will be raked across the coals while “King-Saint Barry” is feted by the media for his second coronation.
Rifle308
I thought that was The People’s Democratic Republic of Austin…
Dallas proper is heading in a similar direction, while all of the suburbs turn scarlet red.