Rick Perry, Mike Toomey, Texas 12-Year-Old Girls... And The $55 Million Bribe

CNN has forced YouTube to disable the embed option on all the Bachmann attacks against Rick Perry during the teabagger debate Tuesday. So above you can watch the segment with a crazy, shouting teabagger. At around the 3-minute mark Bachmann went after Perry's M.O. as the nexus of Texas' Republican Culture of Corruption. Even if Perry's STD problem is most damaging to him in the Republican primary, especially among libertarians and Christian Conservatives, it is a pattern of gross crony capitalism and blatant corruption that could hurt him most among normal general-election voters. Unless someone comes up with photos of Perry in bed with Geoff Conner-- or with any of the young male hookers he's been hiring for two decades-- it's his corruption that is most likely to keep him out of the White House.

No fan of Perry's, after the debate Republican polemicist David Frum posited that Perry is too slow on his feet to be the effective messenger of the right-wing revolution. Despite Bachmann's unexpected outburst Tuesday, Republicans generally don't care that much about their politicians taking bribes. Somehow they admire it and chalk it up to entrepreneurial spirit and the free market. It's part of what makes the GOP a dangerous and nihilistic pathology. But Frum mentioned it in his critique of Perry as well.

We learn things from these debates, and one of them is: how does a candidate respond under pressure? What we’ve seen from Perry in two debates is (1) he gets testy and (2) he makes stupid mistakes.

Perry was supposed to carry the message: “I will save our cherished national institution, Social Security.”

Romney pushed him to substitute the message: “I will save this unconstitutional program I hate.” Good luck with that.

It was not only Romney who outmaneuvered Perry. Michele Bachmann(!) pushed Perry to his funniest blooper of the night: his angry insistence that he cannot be bought for $5,000. That’s one of those denials that opens the way to more embarrassing questions: “How about $10,000?”

As a candidate, Perry’s unnimble mental reflexes are a merely personal handicap. Should Perry reach the presidency, his lack of intellectual resource will have consequences for the nation.

But Frum wasn't about to go to the real question. It isn't about $5,000 or $10,000. Let's try $55 million. That's real money even to the GOP fat cats who run the Tea Party. Perry was able to stump and somewhat effectively fend off the simple-minded Bachmann by claiming all he got for his shocking Gardasil executive order was a measly five grand so it couldn't have been a bribe. Really? Had Bachmann been better prepared, she could have asked him about the $55 million bribe from his old pal Mike Toomey (pictured with Perry on the right), the same character who gave him the $5,000 pop! Palin was better prepared than the dull-witted Bachmann.

On Saturday, not-yet-a-presidential-candidate Sarah Palin previewed an enticing line of attack against Texas Governor Rick Perry: "crony capitalism." Although she didn't mention the latest Republican frontrunner by name, Palin warned Iowa tea partiers that when candidates accept million-dollar donations, you should expect a few strings to be attached. On that front, the numbers seemingly speak for themselves. A full 20 percent of Rick Perry's $100 million fundraising tally as governor has come from Perry appointees, and on everything from toll roads to nuclear waste dumps to private prisons to lawsuit reform, Perry's policies have dovetailed neatly with the interests of his biggest donors.

Yet when NBC's Brian Williams gave Perry's rivals for the GOP nomination a chance to nail the governor at Wednesday night's debate, they all took a pass. The question was about Perry's controversial 2007 decision to mandate the HPV vaccine to inoculate adolescent girls against cervical cancer. Williams wanted to know if Perry made the right call. Reps. Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul both seized on the idea that the executive order was a decidedly Big Government move. Mitt Romney noted that, as Perry himself has said, it was a well-intentioned mistake that Perry would handle differently if he had a do-over.

What went unsaid by his rivals, though, was the full context: Perry's decision came at the end of a massive lobbying effort by the pharmaceutical giant Merck—an effort helmed in Austin by Perry's former chief of staff and longtime friend, Mike Toomey. (Toomey currently chairs a pro-Perry Super PAC with the stated goal of raising $55 million during the primary race to finance a shadow campaign for Perry.) On the day he signed the executive order, Perry received a $5,000 donation from Merck's political action committee, which came on the heels of a $6,000 donation during his reelection campaign. Even his supporters would agree that the HPV decision was an uncharacteristic one for the conservative governor; questions about Perry's motivations are natural.

Why did his opponents take a pass? It could just be that in 2012, GOP candidates-- Palin excepted-- know better than to bite the big business hand that feeds many of them.