Rick Perry might go away for a long, long time: What even the liberal media isn’t reporting about his indictment
At least in 2012, Rick Perry realized he’d forgotten the name of the federal department he wanted to abolish. But when it comes to the charges he’s just been indicted for, he’s certain of what they are. “Bribery,”
he said in New Hampshire recently — but he’s wrong. It’s not exactly a strong position to start from if you’re going to loudly proclaim your innocence. At least he’s got one thing right: “I don’t really understand the details,” he added.
In that, Perry is far from alone. Few, if any, of his high-profile defenders, either left or right, seem to understand much more than he does. Still, you don’t have to be a lawyer to at least have some idea of what’s being charged. The
indictment is online for anyone to read, and it’s not that hard to understand — one count for abuse of official capacity, the other for coercion of a public official. Yet few in the national media seem to have figured that out.
Glenn W. Smith is director of the Progress Texas PAC, so he knows a thing or two about the Lone Star state. He was also part of George Lakoff’s Rockridge Institute, so he’s got a broader intellectual perspective as well — just the combination one would want for a perspective on what’s going on here.
“It was very clear to me that some of the pundits-at-a-distance based their initial opinions on two false assumptions,” Smith said, via email, “1) That the Perry indictments were the product of a nest of angry but unsophisticated Austin liberals; 2) That it was a governor’s constitutional power of the veto that was being challenged.”
There are other major points of misinformation, as we’ll soon see, but these two do seem to be most central. Smith continued:
Now, here is how a journalist’s mind should work (think of a police reporter or any reporter engaged by necessity with daily human messiness). In this instance, faced with the facts that not one but two Republican judges failed to dismiss the criminal complaint against Perry and that an accomplished, conservative special prosecutor had overseen the grand jury indictment, a street-level reporter would think, “There must be more to the game that’s afoot than the Perry narrative wants me to believe.”
more . . .
