Rick Perry v. Virginia

By Cole

Virginia’s GOP presidential primary is March 6. The only candidates on the ballot will be Ron Paul and Mitt Romney, in that order. They drew straws or something because our GOP has no truck with voodoo spelling like alphabetical order.

Here are the main rules for getting on the Virginia ballot:

• Collect 10,000 valid signatures from Virginia voters.
• Signatures must include at least 400 names each from the 11 congressional districts (that’s 4,400 of the names).
• People gathering signatures must be legal residents and eligible to vote.

See anything unfair or hard about this?

Paul and Romney did it with a few thousand signatures to spare, but it proved too much for Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich. (The other wannabes didn’t bother to try.)

Perry’s gatherers weren’t all Virginia residents, so some of his signatures were tossed out. Now Perry is suing Virginia in federal court to block the ballots from being printed until his name is included.

This puts Virginia in a bind because Perry’s hearing isn’t until January 13 and the ballots have to be printed and mailed to absentee voters 45 days before the primary.

Gingrich, who lives in Virginia, shrugged off his disqualification, saying one of his gatherers made up a bunch of names. He thought he could still win as a write-in candidate.

Joke’s on Newt. Virginia doesn’t count write-in votes in primaries.

But Newt’s still unperturbed. He probably expects to transcend mortal voting and ascend to the presidency by divine intervention. Hey, if the Supreme Court could do it for George Bush, why not?

What Rick Perry is GUARANTEED if his litigation prevails is a dead-last finish in Virginia. For all his big talk about states’ rights, he has shown the country he won’t hesitate to use federal power to stomp any state that personally crosses him.

But what I don’t get is why ANY of these primaries mean anything to anybody. They serve no purpose but to help the media fill time they’d otherwise use airing YouTube videos and tweets.

Who cares what a handful of nitwits in Iowa, New Hampshire, or Virginia think? The only special insight they have comes from partisan commercials and robocalls.

So go ahead, Perry. Sue the pants off Virginia and consummate your political suicide. You picked a nice spot for it.