Rick Perry is not lying.  It’s just that “arithmetic” and “remembering” are not his top two stellar Presidential skills.  His third not-top-tier expertness is “logic.”  (If you are reading this aloud to someone, be sure to use air quotes where needed and point out that I, unlike Mr. Perry, can almost always remember three words at once.)

Jumping on the Measles bandwagon, Perry boasted —

“Our vaccination rate in Texas [in 2000] was 65 percent. When I left two weeks ago, it was 95 percent.”

– Former Texas governor Rick Perry (R), in an interview with The Washington Post and the Texas Tribune, Feb. 5, 2015

Hell, I’d loan him my new truck if that were true.

It, of course, ain’t.

Perry’s “proof” is that in 2002 the immunization rate for children under age 3 was 65 percent but now, after Texas has been Perryized, the rate for children entering kindergarten in 2014 is 97%.

Okay, see, that’s like saying in 2002, only 5% of people under the age of 20 needed glasses but in 2014, that jumped to 80% for people over the age of 70.  So, we can deduce that Perry causes bad vision.

It is the age group under 3 years old who need the vaccine most.  Those numbers are as follows:

2000: 63.5 percent

2013: 72.5 percent.

And the rate of vaccinated children has actually declined since 2007.

Why would that be?

Dragsbaek said that Perry had an excellent record on promoting vaccination. In 2003 he signed a bill that made it easier for parents to cite philosophical objections to giving children vaccines, but even so, “my experience has been that Governor Perry was a fairly strong pro-vaccine governor,” she said.

Bless his heart.  This thinking stuff is real hard.

Thanks to everybody for the heads up.