Perry has flaws, huge flaws. Not the least of which is that he presided over the execution of one of his constituents, Cameron Todd Willingham, who was probably innocent. But I’m not sure that’s a liability in today’s Tea Party–obsessed GOP. There’s a legend in Lone Star politics that one of Perry’s Republican rivals in Texas tested the Willingham issue in a focus group. One Republican man, the story goes, squinted and said, “Well, I like that. Takes a lot of balls to execute an innocent man.” At that moment, folks say, Perry’s rival knew opposing him was fruitless.

“You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons” - The Waco Kid

And yeah, they are morons, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get into a position to run shit and do a whole lot of damage. In fact, it may even help them do so. What’s really unique and powerful about Blazing Saddles is that it baldly shows how the kind of white male supremacist morons who would say things like the above have more or less run and exploited this country for their own benefit since its inception, especially on a local level. Sure, it plays their smug entitlement and casual savagery for lots of laughs, but the veneer of satire gets disconcertingly thin at certain points, and those are when the punches really find their target.

Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, and the Tea Party are sort of the same kind of thing for me. Yeah, I want to laugh off these inconceivable assholes (and ridicule can be a really powerful way of fighting them) but there’s a long history of fear, suffering and sorrow lurking just beneath the ludicrousness of it all, and it’s really hard to forget that, as it should be. Mel Brooks had Blazing Saddles end happily, as genre conventions demanded, but the ending isn’t exactly what sticks with you, is it?