Secession for Texas? Obama a Marxist?

Texas Governor Rick Perry has officially out-tea-partied even the most rabid of the hard Right by suggesting that Texas might well be forced to leave the union if American continues to drift left . . . presumably into the dangerous waters of Marxist or Nazi (your choice) totalitarianism. (Never mind that those two systems of government are diametrically opposed; a gun strapped to your leg at a town meeting is enough logic for those who see no conflict with drawing swastikas on Obama while calling him a communist.)

Perry's contribution to the lunatic fringe was reported in The Huffington Post, which reported Perry's remarks late Wednesday, saying "Perry suggested [at one of three Tea Party gatherings he planned to attend] that Texans might at some point get so fed up they would want to secede from the union. 'There's a lot of different scenarios,' Perry said. 'We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that'?"

Clearly, Texas must be a Conservative paradise. I mean, who wouldn't want to live in Rick Perry-land, which the Commonwealth Fund ranked 46th out of 50 states plus the District of Columbia in terms of the overall quality of its health care system, 50th in children's access to health care, 44th on equity, and 42nd in overall quality of children's health care?

Personally, I'd love to be an educator in a state whose students are 49th in verbal SAT scores in the nation and 46th in average math SAT scores.

I could go on and on about "utopian Texas," but the reality is that these comments were not meant to be taken seriously. They were, instead, meant to stir up the base in advance of what could be a tough Texas Republican gubernatorial primary. That Perry thinks of the Tea Party as his base speaks volumes about the state of the Republican party,not just in Texas, but across the country. Things are pretty bad for Republicans, and without the emergence of Lynne Jenkins' "Great White Hope," Perry soon may need a lifeboat to navigate the waters of Nazi-Marxist-Islamic-Pacifistic progressivism.