Not nonsense. The same rules should apply to domain names that apply to trademarks, that would clear up 90% of the problems.
RickPerry.com was unavailable, because someone several years ago bought the domain name and sat on it (domain squatting) so they could sell it later. You can’t do that with a trademark. You must have an actual product associated with the trademark to get official recognition.
You can’t use the same trademark name for products in the same category. There’s a Dove soap and a Dove chocolate—totally different companies with the same trademark name: Dove. They don’t infringe on each other, because they are in different industries. If Dove chocolates starting making cleaning products, they could NOT use the DOVE name on them, because that would then infringe on the DOVE soap trademark.
The same idea should apply to domain names. If they want to use RickPerry.com as a non-political site (say selling horse manure), that would be fine. But, linking it to a political site should be an infringement on the preexisting use of RickPerry.org for political purposes.
Just adopting a couple of ideas from trademark law would clear up a lot of this mess.
BTY
.com was designed for commercial sites, and .org for organization sites. Using RickPerry.com for an organization is technically a violation, but it’s doubtful anyone would do anything about it.
If the current governor of Texas was the only person with the name Rick Perry in the country, you might have a point, but people’s names are note trademarked.