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.
