Oh Poor Dumb Pretty Rick Perry

These new Coal Dogs are the BEST!

Rick Perry, who really is the Secretary of Energy even though he has no idea what that is, visited the Longview Power Plant near Morgantown, West Virginia, today, to see if the place lived up to all the hype on its Wikipedia page, which appears to have been written by the Waylon Smithers of Coal. It's apparently the "cleanest, most efficient coal-fired power plant in the 13-state PJM Interconnection and one of the most efficient in the United States," not to mention the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful coal plant you've ever known in your life. While he was there, he explained economics as only a True Believer in Supply-Side Economics could:

That is not how supply and demand works, Rick Perry! That is not how any of this works! Digging up a lot more coal when even utility companies don't want to buy coal will not make people buy coal! You should have asked Milo Minderbinder about that time he bought all the Egyptian Cotton and then couldn't sell it, not even when he put chocolate on it.

Mind you, Perry did have his defenders, people who know economics every bit as bigly as he does:

See? If you win an election, you get to make the laws. Including the laws of supply and demand. Others thought of similar examples that may be a bit like "clean coal": They built it, and people came, hard.

After his declaration that more supply always creates more demand -- like with the Beanie Babies that have funded so many kids' college educations -- he went on to suggest maybe the market isn't a sure thing after all:

The market will decide which of these — they're going to pick and choose [...] I mean, that's really pretty simple. All too often, you have in the last eight years, you have an administration that was over here putting its thumb on the economic scale as well as the technology scale because they said this is where we want to go.

Gosh, it sure is good to learn all about the Free Market from Rick Perry, who explained that by tilting regulations in favor of coal and against clean water,environmental sustainability, and "safety," the Trump administration has gotten the government out of the business of picking winners and losers in the economy. Now the free market will surely choose coal, and if it doesn't, then Trump will just come down there and make it.

And Rick Perry? He's pretty darn pleased with himself!

 
 serious person

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[ CBS News / Taylor Kuykendall on Twitter]

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