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Making Book

By Patrick Williams 

Making book: As a young senator, John F. Kennedy wrote Profiles in Courage, about various courageous characters who had served in the Senate. Buzz hasn't read it, but we understand it's a "classic" in the political genre, meaning it's one of those books everyone has heard of but no one you know has read. Barack Obama is author of The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. We haven't read that one either, but we suspect it has something to do with hope and America. If he wins the presidency, it will no doubt become a classic. Al Gore wrote Earth in the Balance, which, we've heard, has something to say about the environment. (Look, it's not that Buzz doesn't read. We just read books we might conceivably enjoy. They usually involve spaceships and/or gunplay.)

That being the case, we don't think we'll be reading Governor Rick Perry's new book, soon to be filling remainder shelves near you. In it, he tackles a subject that is truly on the hearts and minds of all Americans today: Why won't that mean ol' American Civil Liberties Union leave the poor Boy Scouts alone? His book is called On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting For. Look for it in the shibboleth section of your local bookstore.

The Austin American Statesman reports that the book "meshes memories of his boyhood in rural West Texas with a fierce portrayal of what he calls indefensible efforts by the American Civil Liberties Union and liberal elites to turn the nation away from traditional values and faith in God."

The Statesman quotes from the book: "The views of a great many Americans are cast aside as over-simplified, and the liberal intelligentsia like to think of themselves as the only legitimate arbiters of morality. They think the public simply doesn't know better and is easily manipulated by the emotional appeals of troglodyte, conservative commentators."

There's something almost quaint—"quaint" being a polite word for "dumb"—about watching Perry post even farther right in a political party in which the holy roller candidates have just been trounced in the primaries.

On the other hand, maybe he's a political genius, anticipating a conservative backlash in the near future—just in time for the 2012 presidential campaign. In that case, he'd better hope the public can be manipulated by the emotional appeals of troglodytes, or otherwise he just wasted a bunch of ink, paper and ghost-writer's time to create a book that would be more honestly titled: Forget Huckabee and Romney. I'm the Real Troglodyte's Choice.