The news media, using that liberally bias thing called mathematics, is showing that Rick Perry took far more than $5,000 from Merck that he claimed in Monday’s debate.  It’s more like almost half a million dollars.

The real tragedy of the whole Texas HPV vaccine fiasco is not that Rick Perry made a mistake.  It’s that Rick Perry made the  mistake of being an untrustworthy jerk, and women will die for it.

When Perry first proposed the idea of inoculating all 12 year old schoolgirls in Texas with a vaccine against the human papillomavirus, the far religious right went nuts.  They claimed, because the vaccine is only effective when given to girls prior to them becoming sexually active, that giving them the vaccine would encourge them to become sexually active as teenagers.

It has been my experience that you really don’t have to do anything to encourage teenagers to become sexually active.  They seem to be able to do that all on their own, as the families of the extremists on the religious right continue to prove to us.

On the other side of Perry’s Executive Order on the vaccine were liberals, who immediately asked, “What’s Perry getting for this?”  We have been carefully taught by Rick Perry that Rick Perry does diddle squat out of the goodness of his own heart.  There’s always something for Rick involved.

It soon became public that Rick’s former Chief of Staff and close personal friend was a paid lobbyist for Merck.  Sometimes kickbacks come in prettier packages than money passed under the table.  Nice jobs for your friends is one of them that has a nice bow.  Rich friends can be generous.  Showing how nicely you treat your friends gets you more friends.  The shades of tissue paper are endless.

Liberals like me were immediately suspect of the vaccine.  Was it safe?  Why the rush?  Most importantly, why trust Rick now?  What’s in it for Rick?  And we thought that because there’s always something in it for Rick.  As it was this time.

I am old enough to remember government curing polio in America and then across the world.  In 1952, this country had 58,000 cases of polio.  Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin’s discovery was earth-changing.  In 1955, under the leadership of that wild eyed liberal, Dwight Eisenhower, in conjunction with the March of Dimes,  we inoculated children for free (or, if I recall correctly, a dime if you had it) across this country.  Nobody got rich.  Nobody got a kickback.

We could have saved women’s lives in Texas if Rick Perry had been trustworthy, and there was not the taint of dirty money involved.  Nobody would have asked, “What’s in it for Ann Richards?”  Everyone in Texas would have known that all that was in it for Ann was her granddaughter’s life.

And that is the tragedy of Rick Perry’s “mistake.”  The mistake of not being trustworthy.  The mistake of crony capitalism, and women will pay for it with cancer.  Simply put, Texans did not trust him with their children’s lives.  Neither should you.

I heard today that Michelle Bachmann was saying that a stranger came up to her after the debate claiming that her daughter had become suddenly “retarded” after this vaccine.  Hummmm …. that’s odd because a stranger came up to me today saying that listening to Michelle Bachmann had caused her ta-tas to fall off.  Holy crap!  That right there is empirical proof that Bachmann should shut the hell up!   Somebody, quick!  Make her shuddup!