AUSTIN, Texas — Gov. Rick Perry said Friday he’s disgusted a California newspaper ran a cartoon that depicts him boasting about booming business in Texas, then shows an explosion, a week after a fertilizer plant explosion killed 14 people in a Texas town. Perry said he wants an apology from the Sacramento Bee on behalf of the town. In a letter to the Bee’s editor, Perry said it “was with extreme disgust and disappointment I viewed your recent cartoon.”…. “While I will always welcome healthy policy debate, I won’t stand for someone mocking the tragic deaths of my fellow Texans and our fellow Americans,” Perry wrote. “Additionally, publishing this on the very day our state and nation paused to honor and mourn those who died only compounds the pain and suffering of the many Texans who lost family and friends in this disaster.”
It was interesting, and I suppose predictable, that Texas Governor Rick Perry was upset over a Jack Ohman cartoon…but not so much over the circumstances that led to it. He can claim with a straight face that Ohman is exploiting the tragic fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, but he remains mute on the lack of regulation that allowed the plant to have 1350 times the legal limit of ammonium nitrate on site. He blames Ohman for “mocking” the “tragic deaths of my fellow Texans” while ignoring how and why it was possible for a fertilizer plant to be sited so near a school and an apartment complex.
Call me silly, or perhaps a rabidly partisan Liberal, but it seems to me that Governor Goodhair is blowing by the forest in order to deflect attention onto the trees. The one thing that isn’t going to stand up to scrutiny is Texas’ corrupt and inept regulatory system. Perry has to know that he’s not dealing from a position of strength, and it’s a hallmark of the desperate to do whatever they can to deflect attention from their shortcomings. He also knows, as Ohman stated in a blog post defending his cartoon, that a truly accurate depiction of Texas’ corrupt and wholly inadequate regulatory system would be far worse. Ohman could have delved even more deeply into a system for regulating industry that’s owned and hamstrung by the very businesses the state is supposed to regulate.
Fourteen people died in West, TX. I’m not going to hold forth on the investigation, because I have no way of knowing what any examination of the explosion will reveal. A reasonable person would have to wonder about a number of things, though- most notable why a fertilizer factory had 1350 times the legally allowed amount of ammonium nitrate on hand? And why was the factory sited so nearly a residential area AND a school? Who was responsible for overseeing the factory? And how much money did the company pay to have regulators look the other way? With the plant’s last inspection being in 1985, those are valid questions Texans should be demanding answers to.
Perry will say all the right words about how 14 Texans died tragic, needless deaths…all while he hypocritically ignores the reality that the state government he leads allowed for the creation of the situation that killed those 14 Texans. Perhaps if Governor Goodhair focused less on making enough noise to deflect attention away from the real culprit and more on who’s responsible for and how to fix the problem, we might be able to have some confidence that something like this might not happen again. Then again, this is Texas we’re talking about.
There you have it; this is the “Texas Miracle,” where a booming economy kills only people while leaving their jobs intact…because you can always find more workers.
