PALIN WITH A PENIS

What could be more Palinesque than engaging in rhetorical overkill and then, even in face of criticism from fellow Republicans, refusing to walk it back?

Rick Perry campaign not disavowing implied threat to Bernanke

I asked Rick Perry's spokesman if the campaign is offering clarification of his widely discussed suggestion yesterday that Texas would offer some "real ugly" frontier justice to Fed chairman Ben Bernanke if he were to print money between now and election day.

The spokesman, Mark Miner, emailed me this:

The Governor was expressing his frustration with the current economic situation and the out of control spending that persists in Washington. Most Americans would agree that spending more money is not the answer to the economic issues facing the country.

The important thing here is that this is the Perry camp’s official considered response — and he is not disavowing the implied threat in his original remarks....

As The Hill noted last month, Perry and Palin are close friends and mutual admirers. I think the two seem quite similar in many ways. I think it's quite possible that Perry's successful, media-magnet campaign rollout was his equivalent of Palin's '08 campaign speech -- and what follows for him on the national stage may bear a similar resemblance to Palin's time in the big leagues. In other words, he's going to inspire a lot of loyalty, but on the other hand he'll rarely back down from an opportunity to say or do something outrageous and self-aggrandizing, even if it's detrimental to his national ambitions, and he'll never qualify or apologize for one of his over-the-line remarks.

If I'm right, then it's going to turn out that Perry, not Michele Bachmann, is the Palin twin in this race. And that really might not work out very well for him.