This past week I read in the Washington Post that Rick Perry has attacked George W. Bush as a closet liberal:
Perry, who closely allied himself with Bush earlier in his career, was a supporter of Bush’s tax cuts and praised his leadership on national security issues. But he has been critical of Bush’s fiscal stewardship and his attempts to court the political middle by taking on issues such as education, immigration and Medicare. He has said that “this big-government binge [in Obama’s tenure] began under the administration of George W. Bush.”Bush rankled conservatives with remarks such as this 2003 comment: “We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.”
Perry has dismissed that idea.
“The branding of compassionate conservatism meant that the GOP was sending the wrong signal, that conservatism alone wasn’t sufficient or worse yet, was somehow flawed and had to be re-branded,” Perry wrote in his 2010 book “Fed Up.”
This past week I wrote the D'var Torah for the groups Street Prophets and Elders of Zion. I focused on the opening words of this past week's Torah reading requiring the Jewish people to appoint impartial judges who do not take bribes. I examined the Talmud's standards for impartiality and questioned whether today's right wing zealots on the bench meet these standards. But, while sitting in synagogue this Saturday morning and studying the rest of the Torah reading, it occurred to me that Rick Perry and his fellow teahaddists fall short of the concept of the Torah, as construed in the Talmud, as to what is the responsibility of the government.