I’m fairly close to becoming a big Rick Perry fan and just picking up my board and catching the wave! However, I have some reservations that stop me from authoring an explicit and direct endorsement. I need to be convinced Governor Perry will have the ability to understand and effectively execute a foreign policy. I want to be convinced he will improve the security on America’s Southern Border. Finally, I’d like to feel warm and fuzzy that Rick Perry has, in fact, made decisions which have strengthened the Texan economy, rather than merely poaching all the good people from disaster areas like California and Michigan. These are my remaining objections that keep me from committing to a Rick Perry vote in the Alabama GOP Primary next year.

I state these objections clearly, discretely and without equivocation or smokescreen. I do so to amplify a bigger point. Most of the objections and attacks I’ve heard leveled at Rick Perry are not logical. They strike me as being red-herrings or smokescreens to disguise a different objection. I’ll put this rudely and bluntly. People are using Gardasil as a proxy to slime Rick Perry so they can camouflage less worthy reasons to oppose the man or just buy time to think up a better reason.

This doesn’t fly. I don’t need to understand the microbiology of herd immunity or the intricacies of health insurance companies to know bull(beep) when I smell a nice, fresh field thereof. There is a very specific reason why I openly went after Mitt Romney/Warmney and The Great Green Newt for their positions on Global Warming but forewent doing the same with Gov. Pawlenty.

Pawlenty publically admitted he should not have been in favor of public policy aimed at remediating Anthropogenic Climate Change. Mitt Romney still doubles down that Global Warming may require significant government involvement to curtail. This all is relevant to the Gardasil discussion because Rick Perry, like Tim Pawlenty looks to have disavowed his previous stance in favor of making Gardasil mandatory, and public admitted he screwed that decision up.

So the continued flap about Gardasil has otherwise rational Conservative Bloggers photo-shopping pictures of Governor Perry so that he looks like Nurse Ratched would if someone tattooed Merck on her forehead.

They are literally taking a page out of Salon Magazine which ran the photo-shopped cheap-shot below.

What these sophomoric detractors accomplish is preventing a more serious and rational examination of how Rick Perry would govern, if he were elected. This is an adult conversation that has to supersede any emotional response we may have to how well he handled his entry into the race, or how much he just screwed up my favored candidate’s chance of winning.

In other words, let’s have some actual RS diaries that explicitly critique or criticize Governor Perry’s job performance or readiness to be President. But let’s base them on something substantial. Let’s not continue hiding behind the Gardasil Proxy and say what we really think about him yeah or nay. Put them up. Let’s vet the man through well-reasoned logic, and not run the risk the Dems did with John Edwards in 2004.