Meet Rick Perry, GOP macho traitor-hunter

WELL,THERE HE goes again and I guess we had better get used to it. Rick Perry, I mean, the boastful chest-pounding marauder just out of Texas who likes to remind everybody that they do things quite differently in his state, pardner. That much is clear from his threat that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Beranke was a traitor who would be treated "pretty ugly down in Texas''. You can read a lot of macho in this Lone Star cowboy with an ego twice the height of an oil well.

In some ways he is an expansive innocent abroad in a nation that dwarfs Texas in size and perspective. At the moment he is riding the media-driven fascination with his dashing entrance into the Republican presidential field as the party's latest Mordred, the bad Arthurian knight who disrupted the round table. The TV folks love something new and controversial on the scene. But can he sustain it all of the way to the GOP convention next year? Should we think Donald Trump?

In the meantime he will pepper his remarks with geographical references that "Back in Texas, etc etc. etc." or 'We can tell you that in Texas blah blah blah." Even Karl Rove, no slouch himself at causing mayhem, found Perry's comments offensive and "non-presidential".

But Rove is one guy that the Biblically pure Perry will not pray for salvation.