I don’t know how I missed this.
Remember how Rick Perry was clinically insane during the debates? He’d forget what he was talking about, be irrationally upbeat, then fall asleep during the second half? I knew he was hopped up on pills. A former pill-popper can smell another pill-popper 10 miles away. Rick Perry was on painkillers the whole time.
Apparently, he would walk the halls, high, singing old workingman’s songs, taking his singing on in the urinal. He had a”bad back”. All opiate addicts have “bad backs”, and all addicts know that painkillers are really fun! Ask Rush Limbaugh! The pain may come and go, but the stupid is here to stay.
from New York City “toilet blogger” Max Read:
Virtually every Republican hopeful had his or her moment. Handsome and down-home, Rick Perry had once seemed a natural champion for the Tea Party pitchfork populism that prevailed in American politics on the eve of the primaries. But some knew better: in September, a close ally of Perry’s had remarked to a friend that if Perry were smart, and if they had a couple of months to prepare, then they’d have a shot. The man added, “But he ain’t, and we don’t.”
A bad back doomed any chance Perry stood to break through. It became an open secret that he was using painkillers in sufficient dosages to keep him standing through the two-hour debates. The manager of a rival campaign was at a urinal in an empty bathroom in Hanover, New Hampshire, before the Bloomberg News debate on October 11, when he heard someone come through the door loudly singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” Wondering who was making all the noise, the campaign manager turned his head and saw, to his surprise, the governor of Texas. Perry came down the row of about twenty urinals and stood companionably close by. Nonplussed, the campaign manager made a hasty exit; as the bathroom door closed, he could hear Perry still merrily singing away: “I-I-I’ve been working on the ra-a-i-i-l-road, all-l-l the live-long day . . .”
Asked about the episode, a top campaign official said, “He whistles. I wouldn’t read anything into it.”
Someone explain to me why tough-talking Republican gunnutz are such lightweights? I mean, really? Back pain? Pain killers? What, the seat of your Hummer was misadjusted? Claiming his campaign fell apart from Vicodin. Fuck, I’ve taken enough Vicodin to stop a herd of buffalo and I was still able to keep all the balls in the air. More or less.
Is it sad that this makes me like him more? Same with George W and his insatiable cocaine habit. Just not for any elected office though. But Rick Perry always seemed to me to not to be any kind of ideologue, he is way too corrupt to stick to any kind of principles. He’s the guy who made HPV vaccination mandatory in Texas, to the consternation of Christian Conservatives. And if Pfizer gave him a SuperPAC, he’d make birth control mandatory. I do prefer a cheerful, drug-addled crook over the fucking Nazis in the GOP, but not one who likes to execute so much.