OH, YOU THOUGHT WHEN HE SAID "FORWARD" HE MEANT "FORWARD"

A clarification from Rick Perry's campaign:

Just One Week Into His Campaign, Rick Perry Disavows His Nine-Month-Old Book

Last November, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) published Fed Up, a 240-page ode to tentherism, which argues that everything from child labor laws to the Clean Air Act to Medicare violates the Constitution. As it turns out, however, claiming that America's entire social safety net is unconstitutional isn't a very popular position -- so Perry's now trying to take it all back just one week into his presidential campaign:

...In an interview, [Ray] Sullivan [Perry's communication director] acknowledged that many passages in Mr. Perry’s "Fed Up!" could dog his presidential campaign. The book, Mr. Sullivan said, "is a look back, not a path forward." ...

Yes -- pay no attention to this passage in the book:

Or this one:

Or this one:

Perry, you see, is a great student of T.S. Eliot, and when he uses the word "forward" in these passages of Fed Up, he's thinking of the famous line in Eliot's Four Quartets:

And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.

So "forward" in this case means "backward." Now don't go twisting Perry's words, hippie!