I love Rick Perry telling George W. Bush, Barack Obama, the Mexican Government and the United Nations to go pound salt up their keisters. You don’t want to be executed, do not commit murder in Texas.
By the way what is the latest with the Newt Gingrich campaign? Ha Ha Ha
by Toby Harnden
If you’re looking for a sign that Governor Rick Perry of Texas is about to run for President of the United States then the execution of one Humberto Leal Garcia is probably it.
By all appearances, Perry didn’t give a damn about the opposition of the Obama administration, the United Nations and the Mexican government. Leal was a Mexican citizen – the reason for the furore – and the Texas governor refused even to take a telephone call from the Mexican ambassador as the death chamber was being readied.
Perry declined to issue a 30-day stay of execution after the Supreme Court voted by the slimmest possible margin of 5 to 4 not to spare the condemned man and Leal duly went to meet his maker an hour after the country’s highest court had ruled.
On the face of it, Perry had every reason to give Leal, who had spent 16 years on death row, another month to live. He could have called the bluff of some of his critics and also presented himself as a potential-be commander-in-chief with a view not only beyond Texas but also stretching farther than American shores.
President Barack Obama had argued that executing Leal would endanger American citizens abroad. This was because Leal, an illegal immigrant who entered the US as a toddler, had not been given the opportunity to have access to Mexican consular officials, a right enshrined in the Vienna Convention.
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There is every indication that Perry will run for president. He has visited major donors in California, begun to assemble a staff and made calls to power brokers in the first-voting state of Iowa. Sarah Palin is rumoured to be preparing to endorse him.
If he does run, we’ll hear a lot about the Texas death penalty, just as we did with Bush in 2000. There will be much outrage expressed among elites, especially in Britain, but until death penalty opponents can come up with a case in which it can be proved an innocent person was executed then the venting will matter little.
What Perry will be able to concentrate on will be his record of job creation – 1.1 million new jobs in Texas during the decade he has been governor – and contrast it with Obama’s feat of increasing national unemployment from 7.3 percent to 9.2 percent thus far.
If Perry’s opponents want to try to change the subject to the death penalty, then that would probably suit the rugged, cowboy-booted Texan just fine.
Read the rest – American Way: Texas execution signals that Rick Perry is poised to run for president
Tags: Bill Clinton, Rick Perry, Toby Harnden
