This is how it’s done, son.
Corndog-eating lessons are next
Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Thursday condemned inflammatory remarks by Ted Nugent that resurfaced when the outspoken rocker this week joined Republican Greg Abbott’s gubernatorial campaign.
Nugent was quoted in an interview with Guns.com last month as calling President Barack Obama a “subhuman mongrel.” He appeared with Abbott during two campaign stops Tuesday, a decision that Democratic opponent Wendy Davis called “repulsive.”
Perry said on CNN’s “Situation Room” that Nugent making outrageous comments shouldn’t surprise anyone. But he condemned his language about Obama.
“I got a problem calling the president a mongrel. I do have a problem with that,” said Perry, who is not running for re-election. “That is an inappropriate thing to say.”
Perry spokeswoman Lucy Nashed told the Associated Press that his comments on the program speak for themselves. She said Perry was not available for an interview.
Rick Perry is good at one thing in this lie, and that’s politics. This is how a skilled politician handles an awkward question. He doesn’t turn tail and scurry away like a cockroach in the kitchen when the light gets turned on. And for the record, Brian D. Sweany, you might have expected Greg Abbott to “run an error-free campaign”, but I never did.
(OK, Rick Perry also has good luck and good timing, since no one remembers this any more. But still, he was smart enough not to do something like that until after he was safely elected.)
Of course, a good politician also has a staff that’s capable of using Google, too. And being caught so egregiously unaware calls into question one’s judgment, which the DMN editorial board goes after.
Abbott thought Nugent’s vociferous Second Amendment advocacy would help burnish the candidate’s gun-rights credentials. But Abbott and his campaign staff apparently didn’t look into the more controversial aspects of Nugent’s past, which should have given everyone reason to keep the candidate as far away from Nugent as possible.
This misstep calls Abbott’s leadership and judgment into question and unnecessarily places his campaign on the defensive.
[…]
This isn’t the first judgment lapse by Abbott. When a Twitter poster referred to Davis as an “idiot” and “retard Barbie” last summer, Abbott responded by thanking the man online.
When American Airlines announced merger plans with U.S. Airways last year, the attorney general joined a federal lawsuit to stop it on antitrust grounds. Then he announced a settlement with the airlines and pulled Texas out of the lawsuit.
Once again, Abbott is giving Texas voters reason to doubt him. Some might shrug off the Nugent debacle as bad advice by his campaign staff, but Abbott is the man in charge.
He badly miscalculated that Nugent’s appearance would help focus this election on distinctions between him and Davis on gun rights, as if Texas voters care about nothing else. Conservatives and liberals alike put lots of stock in civility and respect for the dignity of girls and women. Nugent makes a mockery of those core values.
Remember, none of these were the result of random misfortune. They were the result of deliberate actions by Greg Abbott; in the case of Ted Nugent, actions taken even after he’d been given public warnings that they weren’t wise. Again, Abbott isn’t used to communicating with regular voters. Now he’s finding out what that means. Abbott is likely to feel some more heat over this, as national figures like Rand Paul criticize Nugent, even if he did sort of mumble out some words late on Friday about how what The Nuge said wasn’t appropriate and can we please move on to something less embarrassing to him now. Who is it that isn’t ready for prime time again? PDiddie has more.