Perry Has No Peer

    (fortune.com)

Because we love our family, and they live here, we have made another trip to Texas…..a state which always gives me a lot to think about.

The longest serving governor in Texas history (2000 to 2015) became the candidate in the US presidential election of 2016 who, during a national debate, couldn’t remember the name of one of the US agencies he vowed to eliminate (Energy)…..and then was appointed head of that agency by the Trump administration.  So we shed no tears that Rick Perry is resigning as the 14th secretary of the US Department of Energy at the end of the year.

Like the president he is now serving, Perry was a Democrat before he became a Republican in 1989; so it’s likely neither man detected any irony in Perry’s appointment.  Perry’s record at the Energy department may be as forgettable in American history as the department’s name was in Perry’s memory.

Perry had the dumb luck of presiding over Texas during the first 15 years of the 21st Century, a mostly boom-time of pursuing energy independence in America, when hydraulic fracking extracted record amounts of natural gas from very deep in the heart of Texas. Through repeating cycles of boom and bust, Texas has grown to become home to one-quarter of the top two-dozen largest cites in the USA: Houston (4th), San Antonio (7th), Dallas (9th), Austin (11th), Fort Worth (13th) and El Paso (22nd).  Really, El Paso!

Perry had the equally dumb misfortune of becoming the last-minute substitute for Vice President Mike Pence as leader of the USA’s ill-fated delegation to visit the newly elected Ukrainian president, a former comedian, who I suspect has not found the debacle in Washington, DC since October the least bit amusing.  Nor do I.

I can just see it……President Trump telling VP Pence that the Ukraine trip is toxic: “Don’t go,” Trump may have told him.  “Rick has a terrible memory, so let’s put him in the lead.”

JER