Pro-TARP letter, written two days before the TARP bill passed - signed by Perry and Gov. Manchin (D-WV).
OK fine, right? A lot of people got TARP wrong, and figured that out after the fact.
Now here's where Perry gets really creepy - listen to how he characterizes this letter in this radio interview clip from the next year..
Isn't that just a bit slimy? Seeing as the letter was written smack in the middle of a high profile debate over the TARP bill, would any reasonable person have interpreted it other than as an exhortation to pass that bill?
This is the kind of thing that makes Perry a no-go for me. He took a profoundly anti-conservative, big government interventionist act (urging an incredible, massive bailout for criminal banks) and shamelessly portrayed it as a small-government conservative move, a year later.
He did something extremely similar this year with regards to the anti-TSA-groping bill - used political maneuvers to torpedo it while pretending to support it.
Under these conditions - caught in a pattern of shamelessly misrepresenting his own actions - I have zero reason to want to trust him with the Presidency. There's no trust there because Perry has demonstrated multiple times that Perry cannot be trusted.
Unfortunately the Perry media steamroller is going to make him the nominee - I recognize that - and then we get to sit through another four to eight years of being stabbed in the back, with a Texas-sized grin, over and over and over until the country is so sick of it that it's willing to roll the dice on another Obama than put up with more of it.
This country doesn't have the time for this kind of thing anymore.
That is pretty weak. Sarah Palin has also been bashed for first supporting TARP and later being against it. A lot of pubs regret supporting it, nobody is right all the time.
Not convincing all things considered and certainly does not add anything to the warts we already know are attached to Perry. I think that you just have a gut level dislike of Perry and dislike usually also means distrust. Nothing wrong with that I trust my gut feelings a lot too.