Posted on 09/16/2011 12:46:22 PM PDT by winoneforthegipper
After an appearance in Newton, Iowa today, Rick Perry denied to an unidentified woman that he'd ever supported the 2008 bank bailout known as TARP.
"No Ma'am," he told her.
"I thought I saw a letter where you had written encouraging the support of TARP legislation," he persisted.
"You saw wrong," he replied flatly, as shown in this video, taken by a tracker, of this morning's event.
This isn't the first time the issue has come up, and the questioner might be excused for having read Perry's October 1 letter that way. The letter, co-signed by then-Gov. Joe Manchin in their capacities as heads of the RGA and DGA, came three days after TARP's failure to pass the House rocked the markets.
The AP covered the letter with the headline, "Governors, Business Up Pressure for Bailout Bill." It's very hard to read otherwise.
"We strongly urge Congress to leave partisanship at the door and pass an economic recovery package," they wrote. "It is time for Washington, D.C. to step up, be responsible, an do what's in the best interest of American taxpayers and our economy."
Perry, later that day, released a statement that seemed aimed at countering the impression left by his letter without clarifying what he was calling for: "[G]overnment should not be in the business of using taxpayer dollars to bail out corporate America. Congress needs to take off its partisan gloves and work together to bring both short and long term stability to the credit markets....”
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
My sources are a) a letter signed by Perry himself, and dated during a time period that can only mean one thing. b) Multiple contemporaneous news reports that spelled out exactly what Perry did. c) Perry, in his own voice, bragging later about having supported the legislation.
It's a real short clip, but the audio of Perry is at the end.
By the way, we all knew at the time that Perry and the virtually all of the Republican establishment supported TARP. I can't believe how stupid Perry and his supporters think conservatives are.
This bald-faced lying is going to do him far more political harm than if he had just fessed up and taken his lumps.
” Perry will lie right to your face. The guy is nothing more than a con man. Reminds me of the character in “Paper Moon”-—set during the Great Depression. The conman sells Bibles to widowed women pretending the deceased ordered the Bible....inveigling the distraught widows to overpay b/c the Holy Book’s inscribed with their names.
Perry’s campaign theme is “There’s One Born Every Minute.” “
Perry reminds me more of Bernie Madoff, or Angelo Mozilo...without the dough : )
Herman Cain: My support for Tarp could be a problem:
"If they want to nail me with my support for TARP -- you know what? I'm not going to be able to counter that," Cain told TPM in a wide-ranging interview last weekend. "Here's what we will do -- we will have a spot on our website that says, 'if you really want to know the truth about my position on TARP, go look at this two-minute video.' If they choose not to, I can't change that."Cain defends TARP much in the same way I do:
But he said that anyone who thinks of him as a TARP advocate has the wrong idea. While he supported the idea of government pumping cash into banks during the darkest days of the financial crisis, Cain says he takes great issue with how the money was doled out."I thought TARP was going to be an opportunity for the government to allow any bank that needed to to restructure its balance sheet," Cain said. "But it didn't. It only picked its friends. That's when I turned against TARP."
I take some solace from the fact that a known conservative, smart businessman had the same opinion of TARP as I had, and made the same mistakes as many of us who supported TARP did, and turned against TARP like I did when it became clear.
People who attack me, and others, for not being smart enough to know ahead of time what was coming, well Herman Cain is a pretty smart businessman, and he didn't see it coming.
So to attack Rick Perry for wanting SOMETHING done, when Cain, Palin, and a host of other conservatives were also pushing for something to be done, seems hypocritical to me.
BTW, here's an interesting take on what Cain says. The TARP as it was passed was NOT what he supported. It turned out to be something different. He would be fully in his rights to say he did NOT SUPPORT TARP, because it was a bill of goods sold as something different.
To his credit, he doesn't take that tact, even though it would be truthful. Instead, he let himself get labeled as a TARP supporter, which implies he was for the bill as it ended up.
So here's what I will fault Rick Perry for. I think he also is perfectly truthful, looking at his letter, that he did not support TARP as it turned out to pass. But maybe he should have taken a page from Herman Cain's playbook, and explained that what he didn't support was what finally passed and was implemented.
That is self-evident, because within 2 months of passage he was writing public pronouncements attacking the bailouts that came from the TARP, and saying we had to stop them. What happened in those two months -- we learned what was in the bill and how it would work, and how it could be misused.
In fact, I'd say that the number one reason I have not decided to support Rick Perry yet is that he doesn't often find it in himself to admit to nuances. I appreciate that he'll fight for the particular truth, but I wish he'd acknowledge that the interpretation of his actions is problematic.
I believe him when he says he never supported the actions of the TARP bill. But he could admit he was for some government action, and then either explain why, or apoligize. It would do a lot to undercut the misuse of his letter to attack him directly as a flip-flopper.
I listened to the youtube with trepidation, because I feared it said what you claimed, since I respect you that much. But it turns out that what he said in that audio is that he signed the letter. That's what he "bragged about", signing the letter urging action.
The audio is no more proof of anything than the letter itself. And it is revealing, because certainly by October of 2009, EVERYBODY called it "TARP", yet while he was, by your words, "bragging" he didn't use the word TARP, or say he supported TARP. He said he signed a letter urging action.
A lot of people urged action in September of 2008. Perry was saying he was one of those who urged action. But not that he supported TARP. YOu can believe he supported TARP in the letter, but he didn't SAY he supported tarp in the video.
The only example anybody has of him "supporting" TARP is this one letter written for the RGA/DGA urging "action". That's it. I can understand the argument for the letter being interpreted as support for TARP, but only if there was some other evidence that TARP was what he intended to support.
Where is the congratulatory press release by Perry of the RGA when the bill passed? Usually if an organization supports a specific bill, they will send out notice of how they were part of the solution. I see nothing suggesting that is the case here.
Where is any mention by Perry, either before this letter, or after the bill passed, praising his local delegation for voting for the measure, urging them to do a bailout like TARP, or anything like that?
There is simply no evidence to back up the interpretation given to this letter. It's a lone nugget, sitting in a sea of contrary evidence.
"We needed to do something drastic because we were facing a very drastic situation," Cain explained. "The concept was fine."As an aside, I really really like Herman Cain, and I'm beginning to wonder why I don't just support him.Back in 2008, Cain wrote that anyone who opposed the financial sector bailout was practicing "economic illiteracy."
"They are economically uninformed," he said when I asked if the tea partiers who still oppose bailouts of any kind are among those he talked about in his column.
Except I'm afraid that the moment I do, everybody here will turn against him. Maybe it's best I just leave him be.
I guess the fact that Perry got away with this against that feckless RINO Hutchison has him really cocky.
But nobody I’m associated with is buying it for one second. They’re shaking their heads in disbelief at Perry’s shamelessness.
So, what about Perry’s support for raising the debt ceiling by $2.4 TRILLION dollars?
Are you going to claim that was all a big misunderstanding?
Or, is the spin going to be, “everybody was doing it”?
He also didn’t have any problem taking a couple billion from the Obama “stimulus,” a year later. Right? Plugged a big hole in the state budget with it, instead of using the more than sufficient “rainy days” funds they have sitting around. Didn’t he?
I seem to recall that he was publicly blasting the stimulus on his new website, on the same day he applied for it. Or, did I just imagine reading about all of that too?
I mean, all this smoke, it’s getting in my eyes, bad. Are you sure there’s no fire here somewhere?
I’ve decided to completely ignore any charges made in threads that are off-topic. I can’t hardly keep up with the relevant issues in a thread, and I’m too easily distracted.
Again, as much as I’d like to comment, it’s off topic for this thread, and I’m going to try for a while to only discuss the topic of the thread. Since a couple of people chastised me in this thread for wandering off-topic, I think that’s best.
Contemporaneous news sources all over Texas, and all over the country, were reporting that Perry was supporting TARP, hand in glove with Joe Manchin and the Democrats.
Can you point me to the angry press releases from the Governor denying this widespread falsehood that was being propagated by so many, including the Associated Press?
How convenient.
Again, how convenient.
These things are all of a piece, by the way. Right on point.
#232
You can’t claim that question isn’t on topic.
Find an article, post it, and there’ll be a whole thread to discuss it.
It simply makes the threads less useful if people keep bringing up different topics.
Yeah, right.
Perry was the head of the Republican Governor’s Association. He signed a letter urging passage of the legislation. Pelosi even pointed to it and its “bipartisan” nature as a major talking point.
It’s right there in front of my eyes. What am I going to do, believe my eyes, or Rick Perry?
Especially in context, which is that while out of one side of his mouth he decries bailouts, and stimulus packages, and enslaving our posterity with addition trillions in debt, his actions send a completely different message.
Context matters, you know?
There were several different types of funds, some with unacceptable conditions, others we could live with. The money was appropriated by the Dem Congress and whatever was refused went to other States. Texas citizens will not pay less Federal taxes in the future because of the money we rejected, but we will have less Federal interference.
It was appropriate to object to the bail outs of private businesses rather than a simple propping up of the banking industry. It was appropriate to object to passing the bill, but then take the funds that could be used without violating the Texas Constitution or changing the law and practices in Texas.
Perhaps you’ve read Phil Gramm’s explanation:“If we should vote next week on whether to begin producing cheese in a factory on the moon, I almost certainly would oppose it...On the other hand, if the government decided to institute the policy, it would be my objective to see that a Texas contractor builds this celestial cheese plant, that the milk comes from Texas cows, and that the Earth distribution center is located in Texas.” - http://www.texasgopvote.com/81st-texas-legislature/doggett-layoff-political-education-revenge-schools-and-teachers-002571
Of course, that’s what everybody says.
And so, nothing changes.
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