The Boss went after Rick Perry for imposing mandatory vaccination with Gardasil on 12-year-old girls. Gardasil protects against human pappiloma virus (HPV, genital warts) and, at the time of the 2007 decision, social conservatives were outraged by the idea of requiring that girls so young be vaccinated against a sexually transmitted disease. Libertarians were outraged at the mandatory aspect of the requirement. Perhaps the worst part was that it appeared Perry was acting corruptly, as a favor to lobbyists for the vaccine manufacturer, Merck.
In response to this criticism, Streiff at Red State wrote a post about “the bad faith and dishonest arguments being made in regards to this decision. Unfortunately, people I have previously had some respect for have checked their integrity and intellect at the door on this subject” — and linked Malkin, thus accusing her of a lack of “integrity and intellect”!
Dan Riehl demanded that Red State’s Erick Erickson apologize for that.
Amid all this friendly-fire action, The Right Perspective recalled my own gut-hunch reaction to the Perry campaign’s roll-out: “I felt a need to put on the record my instinctive sense that there’s something fundamentally wrong about the Perry campaign . . . . Some kind of catastrophe will result, one way or another.”
I took a lot of flak for saying that at the time, but if Perry is so self-evidently the GOP Dream Candidate for 2012, why are Jeb Bush, Bill Bennett and John Boehner urging Paul Ryan to get in the race? I don’t know.
What I do know is that a lot of conservatives seem to have doubts about Perry’s candidacy, and that these doubts aren’t getting much media notice amid all the hype about the alleged Dream Candidate.
Perry vs Ryan is kinda like Prime Rib vs Fillet Mignon, for me. The only downside is that they fight each other instead of working together. And I’m not convinced that Ryan couldn’t do more in the House than anyone else, but I guess there’s only one way to find out.
Specifically about the Gardasil thing, the mandatory part was bad, though my understanding is that it was partly motivated by the fact that a mandatory (as opposed to recommended) vaccination would be covered by insurance. That kinda bugs me too (yet another insurance mandate!), although I fully plan to get my daughter vaccinated in another year or two.
Either way, the fact that he actually admitted that it was a mistake is pretty significant as politicians go.
I don’t think it was a mistake. He was trying to stop the spread of a sexually transmitted disease that can cause CANCER OF THE GODDAMNED UTERUS in teen and preteen girls. WTF you want some teenage girl to catch something like that, and maybe inadvertently cause others to catch it just so all other teenage girls will be scared into leading moral lives? YAWN You’re going to have to come up with a hell of a better reason than that to get me to jump on a RINO Bush bandwagon. Ryan needs to stay in the House. Him running for President would be Tim Pawlenty redux. What this election needs is NOT another snooze button.
And the Goddamned Bushes, by the way, including Karl Rove, need to fade into the background of history.
It’s 2011. If I want advice from Jeb Bush or Bill Bennett I’ll ask for it. And I haven’t asked.
And so it begins. The divide and conquer within our ranks, while the liberals gloat and glee.
Honest questions are one thing, and I thought Malkin’s article was mostly fair, and I agree that the Gardasil thing was a disaster. However she made claims of cronyism that are simply not supported by the facts. Of course she has nothing on Pam Gellar’s idiocy about Perry being a fifth columnist.
Yah, except that only a small fraction of HPV’s actually cause cancer. IOW, that’s like inoculating against 2 of 230 cold viruses.
When you add in the BS rhetoric about the ‘effectiveness’ of the inoculation (provided by the manufacturer, duh), some little girls will think they’re “HPV-proofed.”
Wrong.
Jeb Bush, Bill Bennett, and Boehner are not that fiscally conservative!…they don’t want anyone that has any like of the tea party. Watch Rove and Dana Perino on Fox criticizing Perry….they are all Moderate/Lib Republicans. I am not saying that Perry is my candidate, though he might be, but these guys are all Moderates…that is they like a moderately big governement. They do not like what the tea party and Bachmann and Palin and Cain are trying to bring. Perry leans that way much more than Romney…and if tea party conservatives take over the house, Boehner will probably not survive….
These guys want an establishment candidate!…..a Republican they can keep in line, one who won’t respond to the tea Party..
A note, I was one of the many who called and complained about the Gardasil vaccination requirement, and they reversed course….they were responsive to the will of Texans…to me that was a good thing.
Not to mention Karl Rove, Rudy, and a lot of other suspiciously “establishment” twits.
Perry’s made mistakes. So has Ryan, Paul, Bachmann, Palin, GK Chesterton, Bill Buckley, Ron Reagan, (remember legalizing abortion in California?), and Pope Paul VI.
Come to think of it, everybody except Karl Rove. Hmmmmm.
Islamic appeasers, apologists and enablers are a serious threat to our national security, it isn’t “idiocy” to voice concern about it, especially since it is a growing problem not just on the left but also on the right:
http://zillablog.marezilla.com/2011/02/conservative-dhimmitude.html
The Gardasil isue is an oily taint on a rather nice looking swimming hole..
The “opt out” is a piss poor excuse when the vaccine was mandatory..
It’s vetting.. and it needs to be done.
Perry has many problems links to Al Gore/ New worlders/ North American union /Bilderberg /PROGRESSIVES /Islam/.People like Ms Malkin just what to beat the ZERO But Rich Perry has been weak on illegals and look at the super highway where he took peoples land. The Rich Perry is a politcal pimp one day pimpimg for Al the Gore next he is the repubs hero. Just look This man up and you will see for yourself. He had to wait for The ZERO’S poll numbers to drop and get the OK from Bilderberg to Run
Also, the strain that gardasil supposedly protects from doesn’t always cause cancer and isn’t even a permanent disease, often the HPV is a temporary condition that clears up on its own. The only REAL way to protect young girls from HPV is abstinence. Inoculating 11 year olds with a VD shot that is untested for long term effects and has been proven to main & KILL girls who’ve gotten it is not a good idea. If your 11 year old is out getting laid, you’ve got much bigger problems than the risk of genital warts. These kids will have a false sense of security while there still exists no vaccine for AIDS or other venereal diseases that are equally if not more dangerous than HPV. And FYI, not all little kids are having sex, despite what the media and big pharma would have you believe.
Tancredo, Huckabee, Geller, Malkin – Perry getting it from the right.
Ten years after islamic terrorists murdered 3000 innocent people on our own soil, is it too much to ask for a president who is not fricken clueless about islamic jihad and sharia? The last thing we need is a 3rd post 9/11 islamophile in the Oval Office telling us that “islam means peace” (it doesn’t, it means SUBMISSION).
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2011/08/rick-perry-and-islam.html
http://fawstin.blogspot.com/2011/08/praying-that-islam-means-peace-5-xs-day.html
Rick Santorum is the only candidate in the GOP field who truly understands the problem and will not back down in addressing it.
One of the few questions I have for Perry if he’s in bed with Islamic donors for his campaign, just how keen is he to get US off of foreign oil?
Still not seeing why any of this should make me vote against Perry.
THANK YOU!!!!!
He had to wait for The ZERO’S poll numbers to drop and get the OK from Bilderberg to Run
Did your psychiatrist not tell you that you shouldn’t drink on top of your meds?
I agree. And I see that I finally have something in common with vaccination deniers- I don’t care about their daughters either .
Just tell them -I Told You So- , That will surely make everything better.
The hypocrisy, it burns.
Gardasil was a bad idea (making it mandatory) but hardly a deal breaker. I worry Perry can’t beat Obama.
It is all very simple… these kerfuffles are just the prelude to the “official” announcement that Sarah Palin has been running ever since 2008.
I had to laugh about the Ryan possibility… Ryan is doing just great at what he is doing now… if he is so stupid as to listen to those pushing for him to run, well… I feel sorry for him.
Can you imagine how exciting a rally for Ryan would be? Wow… just can’t wait for that one.
All of this “anybody but Palin” crap just shows you how panicked the Establishment and Republican Party boys are because they realize that Palin is getting close to announcing and they are scrambling to try to find anyone or anything that can stop her.
Yes sir, it sure will be a fun primary… lots of fireworks yet to come. Go get em, Sarah.
The Gardasil thing was a huge laspe of judgement. Just becasue some people’s daughters can’t keep themselves to themselves doesn’t mean that my 12 year is a tramp too. And if your 12 year does get HPV don’t you have bigger problems, like who the heck in your house or neighborhood is a child abuser and why isn’t he dead yet?
According to my son’s pediatrician, Gardisil also protects BOYS from HPV, which can lead to some cancers in MEN.
Even if my son is celibate until marriage, what if his bride is a carrier for the virus? He’d be at risk, and I choose to reduce as many risks as I can.
Perry has agreed that he didn’t handle the issue as he should have, but a mistake does not equal evil intent.
Sorry for the double post.
Jeb Bush is dying to jump in, he’s almost chomping at the bits. But he knows what he would be up against, that’s why you’re seeing all this Bush rehabilitation effort, chiefly on Fox. The RINOs are worried that they are going to lose their ascendancy in the Republican establishment, and they’re desperate to stop it. So what do they do? They make an appeal to somebody they think they can control (or who they know will lose) in the person of Paul Ryan, a person who has a large degree of popularity and acceptance within the ranks of the Tea Party. This is all so obvious its sickening. They are pulling out ALL the stops to derail Perry. And when nothing else works, here they go on this Gardasil bullshit, an issue that, in the grand scheme of things, is so minor, it wouldn’t amount to the importance of a gnat ten blocks away.
I don’t know whether you ever caught on to this yet, but just so you’ll know, teen age boys have been known to screw teen age girls. Sometimes they have even been known to screw two or three, or more. Also, just so you’ll know, it doesn’t necessarily have to mean your daughter is a “tramp” if she messes up, has a lapse in judgement, and screws once, hell maybe two or three times if she falls for the right line of shit from the right little punk her age. Some guys are just “gifted” like that, and, believe it or not, one time is all it takes.
Very well put on all counts.
Oh, and one more thing-just so you’ll know-if my twelve-year old daughter contracted HPV, that will pretty much trump every other problem I can think of. At least I damn sure hope I wouldn’t have anything worse than that to contend with at the same time.
Fox is getting damned near unwatchable. Rove is on nearly as much as Obama (and why do they show Obama full length blathering away everytime the ass steps in front of a microphone anyway – pre-empting EVERYTHING to do it?) They also gave Ron Paul heaps of talky time the last few days, Megyn Kelly had him on for like 20 minutes the other day, as have others but they still totally ignore Rick Santorum aside from the 30 seconds he got on Hannity the other night and all Hannity wanted to talk about was Perry!
I’m not a Perry fan, but you’re dead on about Fox’s agenda driven coverage of the GOP field.
The Gardasil thing, while troubling, isn’t really an important issue for 2012 except that it may reflect on what kind of a politician Perry is, but he did back away from it so it’s not like a president Perry would be pushing for nationwide mandatory Gardasil shots or anything.
And not to split hairs, but it’s cervical cancer, not uterine cancer, but again Gardasil does not protect against all the strains of HPV that can cause it and HPV not only does not always cause cancer (or even often cause cancer) it also isn’t always a permanent affliction. but no, I don’t think that’s the big reason not to support Perry, the dhimmi thing is. I don’t think it’s deliberate like Obama & Chris Cristie, I think it’s more naivete, like GWB, but whether out of ignorance or malice, it is just as dangerous.
Yeah. Look at what happens when everyone just buys a candidate wholesale without vetting and then bitches at any attempts to vet him at all: Obama.
Perry’s got a killer immigration policy, though…
http://tinyurl.com/3pqgvrt
Oh, don’t misunderstand. I’m all for vetting every candidate. But sometimes it’s almost Long Knives-ish the way we go about it, which serves to give the liberals more ammo.
Sounds more like he’s mixing chronic with his Paxil.
Yeah, like I’ve said before, if he is a dhimmi, or weak on illegal immigration, that would be serious cause for concern. The only concern I would have about the Gardasil thing would be whether he was doing it out of some collusion with the company that makes the drug. That would be disturbing, but all of this anxiety over making kids get vaccinations doesn’t make sense.
We’ve been doing that for decades now. I don’t know whether they still do it or not but when I was in school, one of the first thing we had to do was get shots. Schoolchildren have been inoculated for everything from mumps, chicken pox, some strains of influenza, polio, hell name it. What’s so different about this? Of course it bothers people because they assume it either insinuates their kids are immoral or in some way might encourage them to be immoral, which doesn’t really make a lot of sense.
By the time a young kid gets around to having sex, what ones do, that one Gardasil inoculation would probably be a distant memory. What, a sixteen year old girl is going to factor that into her decision to have sex with her boyfriend, a shot she had four years or so earlier? Please.
Granted, it turned out later the drug could be dangerous. Fine, but that’s an entirely different issue.
Then you have these jackasses that jump up and pontificate about how their little darlings are not “sluts” or “tramps”. Yeah, I’ve known people like that, whose little darlings would never do anything wrong. One of them had a daughter that would screw a coke bottle if the school basketball team wasn’t available. Another one ended up charging guys twenty dollars a pop to watch her go at it with a shepherd. And I’m not talking about the kind that herds sheep. Half the time you hear people talk like that they’re ranting out of pure naivete and more often than not their precious innocent darlings are the best reasons for drugs like Gardasil.
Yes, it is idiocy to accuse someone of being a fifth columnist for a) being friendly to non-crazy Muslims and b) speaking on the same stage as someone else who is a Muslim apologist.
Robert Spencer has a good piece about the need to vet candidates – all of them – especially over islam:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/08/why-shouldnt-rick-perrys-islamic-ties-be-vetted.html
For some reason, DISQUS won’t let me reply to Pagan Temple’s reply to my, so I’ll put it here. The Gardasil shot is different from vaccinating for measles, mumps, etc. in the a child will ONLY catch HPV by having sex, whereas just being in the same room with someone who is carrying the other diseases we vaccinate against will put them at risk. A child in a classroom who is not vaccinated for HPV does not endanger the child in the next desk unless they are having sex. A person unvaccinated with gardasil does not risk infecting mass quantities of people simply from breathing near them. HPV is not typhoid. Also, the dangers of HPV have been highly overblown to the point of hysteria. It’s the H1N1 of sexuality.
Who is this non-crazy Muslim? Newsflash, if a person is a practicing Muslim, a devout Muslim, he’s a security risk by definition. Not all Muslims by birth are practicing Muslims, but the ones that are have questionable loyalty issues. It’s on the same level as watching a group of Mexicans running single-file across the border and saying, “well maybe they are just heading to the nearest Taco Bell.”
There is more:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/08/why-shouldnt-rick-perrys-islamic-ties-be-vetted.html
And it is dangerous idiocy to not properly vet presidential candidates. Look what that got us the last time around.
I think Paul Ryan needs to stay where he is.
As for Perry, I think he’s our best shot, certainly I don’t think we have anyone better right now.
Yeah, I’m not going to go along with “the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim” thing. If you want to act like every single brown person you come across is a security threat, good for you.
Yes, yes, I know I’m a dhimmi now. Blah blah blah.
Not every “brown” person. There are plenty of good, decent Hindus, Jews, and Christians and even atheists who are “brown”. And I’m not even particularly concerned about the “brown” people who happen to have had the misfortune of being born into an Islamic family. Like I said, my concern is with practicing, DEVOUT Muslims. I repeat, they are a security risk BY DEFINITION.
But of course, being the good Dhimmicrat that you almost definitely are, you twist my words to give them a racist connotation. Good job chief. Just so you’ll know, if we ever get to the point where Muslims do take over the country, here’s a little piece of advice-they like it better if you swallow.
One of these days I’m going to have to join up with this Bilderburg group if I can find somebody that will put in a good word for me. Maybe my Illuminati mentor can help out.
I saw Santorum on Hannity and he didn’t come off too well to me. He’s another one jumping on this Bush-Rove bandwagon of putting Perry down because of his “uncivil tone” against Bernanke. I understand that’s he’s running against Perry and so I don’t expect him talk him up, or necessarily even to defend him, but somebody among his supporters like you need to get a memo to him that this “civil tone” bullshit is a complete non-starter if he ever expects to build on his support.
Yeah we do, her name is spelled P-A-L-I-N
Exactly. The weakest part of Malkin’s article were the claims of cronyism; otherwise, her other criticisms of Perry were valid and somewhat convincing.
Representative democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others; free-market capitalism is the worst economic system – except for all the others.
When you’re being chased by a bear in the woods, you don’t need to run faster than the bear; you just need to run faster than your human companions.
Off of Foreign oil? And “on to” what for godsakes? Windmills powered by unicorn farts?