Perry Gives the Left Someone New to Hate

Rich Lowry discusses some of the reasons the left will go apoplectic over Rick Perry:

Texas governor Rick Perry is about to stride purposefully through every cultural tripwire in the country.

He may not become as despised as Sarah Palin, but that’s because he’ll never be a pro-life woman — the accelerant for the conflagration of Palin-hatred. The disdain for Perry won’t burn as hot, but it’ll burn just as true. He’ll become a byword for Red State simplemindedness in the New York Times and an object of derision for self-appointed cultural sophisticates everywhere.

You could be mistaken for thinking that Perry set out from his infancy to trample on certain eastern sensibilities. Born in nowheresville Texas to a family of cotton farmers. An Eagle Scout. Attendance at Texas A&M, where he was a “yell leader” — basically a male cheerleader — and in ROTC. After earning a degree in animal science and serving in the Air Force, he entered politics and eventually ascended to the governorship in the wake of another hated Texan — George W. Bush.

Perry makes Bush look like a sniveling elitist, what with his patrician, highly credentialed family. Perry went to Paint Creek Rural School in Haskell, Texas; Bush went to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and then on to Yale and Harvard.

Perry is a great partisan of Texas and has mused about its leaving the union. He’s an evangelical Christian who unembarrassedly prays in public and for his state. He’s a tea partier who extols the Constitution and seeks a drastically limited federal government. He’s a law-and-order conservative in a state that still executes people.

It’d be almost impossible to come up with a background and cluster of affiliations so provocative. Texas has all the negative charge for liberals that Massachusetts does for conservatives. Perry will be branded as a backward, dimwitted, heartless neo-Confederate. A walking, talking threat to the separation of church and state who doesn’t realize people like him were supposed to slink away after the Scopes trial nearly 90 years ago.

Read the rest of it here.

The left will seek to destroy Perry as quickly as they can and will use any excuse to do it. Yesterday Perry made comments about Ben Bernanke that really got them going. His comments suggesting that Bernanke's money printing dollar devaluation was tantamount to treason, and lefty heads exploded. They were convinced this was some sort of "Macaca" moment that could put an early end to his campaign.

Hardly. Had his comment been made in October of 2012 there might have been some minor impact, but in August 2011, any controversy it caused will die a quick death and Perry will probably rephrase his criticisms in the future. Lesson learned.

And, of course, Perry's comments will only endear him to conservatives who have been waiting for someone to come along and take on the left in no uncertain terms.  For instance, this reaction from Kurt Schlichter:

I am a Conservative: So, who did Rick Perry knock on his sorry pinko ass today? #Caring

And for fun, you can look at this article from The Atlantic which apparently takes offense at Perry's masculinity. After 2 1/2 years of a girly-man president, the left is pretty frightened at the thought of testosterone in the White House again.