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.”
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