NOW, THEREFORE, I, RICK PERRY, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.

Maybe God just doesn’t like Rick Perry, or maybe he’s just a hopelessly ineffective prayer. Months ago Rick Perry issued a proclamationto pray for an end to the drought plaguing Texas. Nothing happened of course, no rain anyway, it simply got much worse. Perry followed this up with the great Texas prayathon and rain dance a few weeks ago. Still nothing. A mild cold front came through last night, not one drop of rain. Now, smack dab in the middle of hurricane season, while neighboring Louisiana is drenched by Tropical Storm Lee, wildfires fueled by drought and high wind grew so dangerous that an entire town near Austin had to be evacuated. An entire county may follow suit today:

An amalgam of three fires in Bastrop, dubbed the Bastrop County Complex Fire, has destroyed more than 400 homes, according to an official with the Bastrop County Sheriff’s Office. Included are several homes of Sheriff’s Office employees who continue to work. The fire has spanned 16,000 acres and is around 16 miles long, according to the Texas Forest Service.

I’ve heard there are such things as prayer coaches. Maybe our governor needs one. Even if they don’t work it’s hard to imagine how Perry could do much worse. His glaring spiritual failure has become so great that, inevitably, sooner or later, we’ll be subjected to Act Two: The Rationalization.

Perhaps the always reliable revisionism and misdirection, as in “we never prayed for rain, we prayed for America!”. Or maybe Perry will play the humble card, AKA the witnessing, about he learned not to presume and beg the Almighty because … [insert Biblical parable]. A real possibility is the self-righteous projection, ‘how dare you make political hay’ out of Rick Perry’s mendacious political stunts. I might wager it’ll be some odious accusation about how the state and/or nation deserves this for not doing what some obscure kook claims Republican Jesus commands. Maybe we didn’t pray hard enough. But a smart gambler would go long on the whole suite and ride the wingnut spread to glorious victory. It can’t lose.