Insidious

Rick Perry pushes new product for Texas COVID crisis -- and gets snippy when asked about his financial stake in ithttps://t.co/dWHFUnxGji

— Raw Story (@RawStory) August 23, 2021

Rick Perry is a particularly nasty piece of work.

What he’s peddling are air filter systems that supposedly will make schools safe to be in without masks. Of course, schools exchange outside and inside air every time an external door opens. They aren’t clean rooms making computer chips or surgical wards. What, exactly, would this system do a regular HVAC filter doesn’t do?

Texas schools are notoriously underfunded. The smaller districts can’t afford what Perry’s peddling. The larger ones give up so much locally raised tax dollars to the state they can’t afford it either, mostly because they have so many campuses to outfit.

Buildings would have to be closed to install this equipment, so it can’t realistically be done before Christmas, and in the larger districts not even then. The summer break wouldn’t be long enough to do the work. And what would it do? Almost nothing.

Masks are cheaper, easier, and less permanent. But they don’t line Perry’s pockets.

So our schools are broke, but not so broke Perry won’t sell them a solution that doesn’t work for a problem they won’t long have. The saving grace is he’s unlikely to sell it to even one school district. That and it’s not as bad as DeSantis telling people to get sick, the state will administer the Regeneron, to the benefit of his donors.

There’s always somebody worse. There really is no bottom.