On Friday, a grand jury indicted likely GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry on two felony counts, making him the first Texas governor to face criminal charges since 1917. Briefly: In 2013, Perry asked the Travis County district attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, a Democrat, to resign after she was busted for drunk driving. When she refused, Perry threatened to cut funding for an anti-corruption unit that Lehmberg’s office oversees. (He eventually followed through on the threat.) According to special prosecutor Michael McCrum, Perry’s actions constituted illegal abuse of power and coercion of a public official. Naturally, Perry does not believe that he committed any crimes — and he would like to point out that some prominent liberals might agree with him.
“I stood up for the rule of law in the state of Texas, and if I had to do it again I would make exactly the same decision,” said Perry during an appearance on Fox News Sunday. “This is not the way that we settle differences, political differences in this country. You don’t do it with indictments. We settle our political differences at the ballot box. Across the board you’re seeing people weigh in and reflecting that this is way outside of the norm.”
Perry went on to cite a tweet from former Obama adviser David Axelrod, who wrote that the indictment “seems pretty sketchy.” He also noted that legal scholar Alan Dershowitz — a self-identified “liberal Democrat who would never vote for Perry” — said that he was “outraged” by the charges. (“Everybody, liberal or conservative, should stand against this indictment. If you don’t like how Rick Perry uses his office, don’t vote for him,” Dershowitz told Newsmax.) “When you’ve got David Axelrod and Harvard law professor Dershowitz saying the things as they’ve said, I think it’s pretty reflective of what we’re working with here,” Perry concluded. It seems that all of his West Coast metrosexual signaling has finally paid off.
