I so agree with the fabulous blogger "In the Pink", who notes that Rick Perry is a terrible candidate for president. Yes, he is. I beg your pity. For though my Oregon-born friends up here in the not-hot-enough Pacific Northwest could EVER understand my pain and suffering, it is TERRIBLE to be a Texan and be deprived of my birthright, Texas Pride. (I'm not talking about the beer. Incidentally, I once gave a can of Texas Pride to Tom Wolfe, who was a visiting speaker at my college in Minnesota, and whose tailor's son was my boyfriend at the time. So I had lunch with the two of them and gave Tom Wolfe the beer -- since he was a sort of a sociologist, I knew he'd think it was hilarious.) Anyway, when you grow up in Austin and you make regular visits to the Capitol to view the magnificent gigantic paintings of battles, and you color maps of Texas, and your brother plays the role of Stephen F. Austin in the third-grade Texas pageant, and you make drawings of "Come and Take it", and you sing "Texas Our Texas", and "Beautiful, Beautiful Texas" and you lie down in bluebonnet fields every spring, and you've actually seen (well, from a distance) Molly Ivins and Ann Richards and Gonzalo Barrientos around town, and your daddy hunts, and you call him your daddy instead of your "dad", and your legislature is funnier than anyone else's, and you get to eat the best BBQ in the world and the best Mexican food and when you're gone you always want to come home to the Armadillo -- well, you have Texas Pride.
