Moving Forward At Your Own Perry-il, Part 7

In hindsight, Rick Perry should probably have been made aware that writing a book at all designed to cater to the Tea Party nutjobs meant he had recorded unpopular positions he couldn't weasel out of by calling them a liberal media plot to misquote him and that he'd have to quickly deny any and all knowledge of the tract as soon as he made his Presidential ambitions known.

[Perry's] communications director, Ray Sullivan, said Thursday that he had “never heard” the governor suggest [Social Security] was unconstitutional. Not only that, Mr. Sullivan said, but “Fed Up!” is not meant to reflect the governor’s current views on how to fix the program. [...]

In an interview, Mr. Sullivan acknowledged that many passages in Mr. Perry’s “Fed Up!” could dog his presidential campaign. The book, Mr. Sullivan said, “is a look back, not a path forward.” It was written “as a review and critique of 50 years of federal excesses, not in any way as a 2012 campaign blueprint or manifesto,” Mr. Sullivan said.

The campaign’s disavowal of “Fed Up!” is itself very new. On Sunday evening, at Mr. Perry’s first campaign stop in Iowa, a questioner asked the governor to talk about how he would fix the country’s rickety entitlement programs. Mr. Perry shot back: “Have you read my book, ‘Fed Up!’ Get a copy and read it.”

Right.  So a book written nine months ago does not nor did it ever reflect the Governor's current views.  Perhaps it's because the book included changes to the US Constitution like this:

Among Perry's changes, ending lifetime tenure for federal judges, allowing a 2/3rds vote in Congress to overrule any SCOTUS decision, a balanced budget amendment and scrapping the 16th and 17th Amendments, ending national income tax and direct voting for senators, not to mention the end of same-sex marriage and abortion...and putting that in the Constitution as well. 

Of course the real problem is that in the book, Perry challenges that Social Security is unconstitutional as well.

Perry not only argued that Social Security is bad policy but also questioned whether Congress ever had the power to enact it. He argued that the Taxing and Spending Clause allows Congress to levy taxes and spend money only in limited areas. He said he doubted that when the founders gave Congress this power they were "thinking about a federally operated program of pensions."

So really, Rick Perry is telling you that as long as you don't pay attention to the book he wrote on his political positions, he never took those political positions.

More on this idiocy at Rumproast and Steve M.'s place.