This week in the Republican Idiot Brigade, we look at George Pataki, Rand Paul, and Rick Perry. A couple of these candidacies are exercises in futility, but they’ll give us great material.
George Pataki: I’m not really sure why he’s running; he doesn’t seem to inspire anyone in either party. He’s what’s known as a “Vanity Candidate“, someone with virtually no chance of winning, who runs anyway. The field of candidates for the 2016 GOP nomination is full of them. Even though he’s not a viable candidate, I’ll spend a little time on him since many readers may not be familiar with him. Pataki was governor of New York for 3 terms, from January 1, 1995 – December 31, 2006.
As NPR reports: He’s the oldest of the presidential prospects on the Republican side… If elected, he would be the oldest person to take the oath as president. The former governor of New York was born in June of 1945, so he will be 71 on Election Day 2016.
In Pataki’s last term as Governor of New York, the New York Post wrote a piece titled: “GOOD RIDDANCE; WHY PATAKI WON’T BE MISSED“. Not the kind of note one would want to end on, but seemingly justified. As the author Fredric Dicker writes:
AFTER 12 years and three terms, Gov. Pataki leaves state government far worse then he found it: Albany is scarred by notorious dysfunction, afflicted with pervasive corruption and marked by a torpidity unprecedented in modern times.
…it’s long been clear to those who negotiated or worked with the governor that little of what he said publicly was true and much of what he said privately was unreliable.
Friends calculated Pataki averaged about 15 hours a week of real work.
He further alienated many in the press and political classes by walling off historically public hallways at the Capitol. This “Fort Pataki” served to deny public view of the stream of lobbyists, political consultants and other special interests that regularly trooped into the governor’s office.
* He held no more than three Cabinet meetings during his entire 12 years in office. He frequently didn’t know the names of his commissioners and occasionally mispronounced them, even in public.
* Pataki broke virtually every political promise he ever made.
Some of that sounds much like Mitt Romney’s Governorship of Massachusetts. In announcing his candidacy, Pataki claimed:
When I took office, we had every poverty program government could think of. Yet one in 11 of every New York state resident was on welfare,” he continued. “But after 12 years of my conservative policies, we replaced dependency with opportunity, resignation with hope mere existence with dreams, a welfare check with a paycheck.
Pataki also seems to have used the same shell game as Governor Mitt Romney when it came to taxes. While Pataki likes to tout his Tax cuts as Governor (he cut the personal income tax by 25 percent), The New York Times reported in 2005:
New Yorkers are now feeling the impact on their pocketbooks: the governor’s tendency to use incremental increases in fees and assessments — taxes by other names — to help close budget deficits.
In a 2006 National Review post titled “Goodbye George” they write:
“Among his leading first-term accomplishments were his $3 billion, 25 percent income-tax cut and a substantial cut in the capital gains tax and inheritance tax,” states the Cato Institute’s “Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors: 2006.” However, in his second term, Pataki “raised the cigarette tax to $1.50 per pack. He raised taxes on net, by more than $3 billion his final term in office.”
Under Pataki, the state budget has soared 79.5 percent — from $63.3 billion in 1994 to $113.6 billion in 2006.
And on a possible 2008 run for President they write:
“Pataki is prepared to give the nation what he gave New York: out-of-control spending, corruption, political favoritism, and neglect,” warns Hudson Institute president Herbert London… “To suggest that the last 12 years of his leadership were a failure would be a grotesque understatement.
Nope, old George won’t be getting the nomination.
Rand Paul: Rand Paul is a strange little guy; at first glance he’s not easily pidgeon-holed into any particular “type” of candidate. Unless of course you’re talking plagiarists, which the GOP seems to have an abundance of. Eventually you realize that whatever he calls himself, he’s just another Conservative, with the same baggage.
Probably one of Rand Paul’s most disconcerting opinions, considering he’s in the medical profession, is his belief that life begins at conception, thus a fertilized egg should have full human rights.
Truth be damned, he still believes tax cuts create jobs, and vaccines cause mental disorders.
Beating the GOP’s “free stuff drums”, Paul has said
“For those who are struggling, we want you to have something infinitely more valuable than a free phone, we want you to have a job and a pathway to success”.
This of course is alluding to the false claim that taxpayers are paying for free phones for the poor. (That program, actually begun in 1984, is not paid for by taxpayers, but by Universal Service Administrative Company, an independent, not-for-profit corporation.)
Paul is the first candidate for office to meet with the marijuana industry, having realized that the higher folks are, the more likely they are to vote for him.
Rand Paul is bought supported by the usual Republican suspects; his donors of note include:
Club for Growth: The typical Republican arm looking for tax cuts, less regulation, yada, yada, yada… They claim to “have an enormous influence on economic policy…”, which I’m sure is true; a hell of a lot more than an a real citizens’ group would have.
National Right to Work Cmte: Named for the Republican term which simply means Union Busting, nothing more.
Koch Industries: If you don’t know who they are by now, you really should have your voting privileges revoked.
Citizens United: Their “Who We Are” page describes them this way: “Citizens United is an organization dedicated to restoring our government to citizens’ control.” Probably the most blatant bullshit statement you’ll read in your lifetime.
Murray Energy: You’ll recall this paragon of corporate citizenship as the owner of the Crandall Canyon Mine where 6 miners and 3 rescuers died in 2007. They also forced employees to attend a Romney appearance at the mine without pay, and coerced employees to donate to Republicans under veiled threats of job loss.
Rick Perry: I honestly can’t believe this guy is willing to humiliate himself by running for President again. Poindexter glasses or not, it’s a safe bet he’s no smarter than he was in 2012, when he couldn’t recall which three departments he’d cut as President in a GOP debate.
Perry is the longest serving Governor of Texas, froom 2000 to 2015. In 2011, before his first campaign for President, Perry touted his record in Texas saying:
“They’re coming to Texas because they know there’s still a land of freedom in America, freedom from over-taxation, freedom from over-litigation and freedom from over-regulation, and it’s called Texas. We need to do the same thing for America.”
At a political event in New Hampshire, Perry claimed:
“Under my leadership, we had 14 years of balanced budgets. Never skipped a debt payment, never raised taxes. In fact, I signed the largest tax cut in Texas history.”
As the New York Times reported in 2012:
Under Mr. Perry, Texas gives out more [business] incentives than any other state, around $19 billion a year… Texas justifies its largess by pointing out that it is home to half of all the private sector jobs created over the last decade nationwide.
Along with the huge job growth, the state has the third-highest proportion of hourly jobs paying at or below minimum wage. And despite its low level of unemployment, Texas has the 11th-highest poverty rate among states.
To help balance its budget last year, Texas cut public education spending by $5.4 billion — a significant decrease considering that it already ranked 11th from the bottom among all states in per-pupil financing… Yet highly profitable companies like Dow Chemical and Texas Instruments continue to enjoy hefty discounts on their school tax bills through one of the state’s economic development programs.
As the Texas Tribune wrote in a wrap-up of Perry’s tenure as Governor:
Critics will find plenty wrong with a state that has the highest percentage of uninsured residents in the nation, produces more greenhouse gas emissions than any other state and has led the nation in workplace fatalities for 10 of the last 14 years.
But hey, they don’t have any of them danged business regulations. A few Perry criminal justice highlights from the Tribune :
- Texas “ranks fourth in the nation for the number of prisoners incarcerated.”
- Perry has “overseen 319 executions, more than any other governor in the country.”
- In 2001, Perry vetoed a bill banning execution of the mentally disabled. The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that executing the mentally disabled violates the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Yeah, he’s not getting anywhere near the White House either; but if he makes it to the debates, he’ll sure be fun to watch.
Next Week, Rubio, Santorum, Trump, and Walker