BY KAREN WEBB

As usual I did not watch the debate, but this morning, for the first time, I tried the stationary bike at the college and Rick Perry pops up on the huge screen hanging from the ceiling, with a very arrogant, teasingly frat boy look on his face, and says something like: “You think I can be bought for $5,000? I’m offended.”

Then it goes back to Michelle Bachmann and she says something like: “Tell that to the girls and mothers who didn’t get a choice.”

I was of the opinion that neither one of them wanted females of any age to have a choice, but we will get to that later.

What planet has Bachmann been on? We are talking Texas T here, not penny anti poker. Saying Rick can be bought for $5,000 is like calling a $2,000 a night Wall Street Sugar Daddy’s call girl mistress a $50 a trick hooker.

Rick is no slot machine; he is the prize in those invitation-only, high-dollar games in the back room. It was a rare moment of complete honesty. Those of you who think Rick cares if you threatened to vote for someone else or if you give him the $20 you have left of your Ponzi Scheme Social Security over-indulgent check or your $5,000 life savings, he is letting you know now you need to bid a whole lot higher or stay home.

Rick Perry is no George Bush, except the part where he was a lousy student, college cheerleader and frat-boy prankster, fly-boy who never saw combat and not-so-hot governor of Texas.

They both prefer doing all their killing by lethal injection, sending you or your kids to fight in pre-emptive wars for profit or by denying you and yours health care.

I hate to say this, but Dubya is really more likeable. Perry is the snooty, God’s gift to women, Mr. Handsome.

Bush was a 5% owner of the Texas Rangers, a PR guy with name recognition and his father was vice president when he told his biographer that he didn’t like sitting in the air-conditioned owner’s box.

“I want the folks to see me sitting in the same kind of seat they sit in, eating the same popcorn, peeing in the same urinal,” he said.

Rick Perry can’t be bought for $5,000 and neither can Dubya, but from everything I have read, Rick would prefer the folks see him up there in the AC, peeing with the millionaires. In 1994 Perry told the Dallas Morning News: “If Karl Rove hadn’t been my consultant, I would not have been agriculture commissioner today. My brain is like a chicken pot pie. His is like a refrigerator that is all very organized – pickles here, salad there.”

He left out the moldy “chicken pot pie brain” that Karl, the refrigerator, Rove is trying to sell as a gourmet main course that is sitting in the corner. He sold that in 2000 and we still have a bad taste in our mouth.

We could debate the idea of making it mandatory to give your daughter the HPV vaccine, but a lot of people object to every kind of vaccine. However, Bachmann is very willing to butt-in and make decisions regarding other aspects of your health care and that of your family, so I don’t know why she objects to this. Michelle knows all about raising children because she has had five of her own and, according to her, she has raised 23 foster children. She has raised some in as little as a few days and others it took a few months to raise them, beginning when they were all teenagers. It’s the potty training she can’t handle.

She and Rick are both apparently aware of their lack of ability with regards to teaching “their form of morality” to their children and other people’s children. They say if you give a boy a condom he will immediately take that to mean you want him to have sex before he gets home from school. If you give your daughter any information at all regarding birth control you are telling her you want her to have an orgy with the football team.

You would think telling them it is a sin and making sure they know all about AIDS and VD would be enough, but it isn’t – you have to canonize it into the Constitution.

They know they are really lacking in their abilities to teach morality so they have to legislate it. Too bad we can’t get something in there regarding the filthy rags of self-righteousness.

Do not call Rick Perry cheap – it is offensive to corporate whores of his stature.

– Karen Webb lives in Moore, OK and is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer