Who is riding off into the sunset first?

It’s no surprise to fellow Republicans that Romney and Perry (aka John Wayne wannabe) can’t stand each other.

“The tension between the two goes back at least five years, tracing back to a 2006 blow-up when the two Republicans served together as governors. At the time, Romney, then the Republican Governors Association chairman, hired veteran media strategist Alex Castellanos to do work for the national group — a direct affront to Perry, since Castellanos was working for Carole Keeton Strayhorn, who was running as an independent against the Texas governor.

“There was a big blowup” between Romney and Perry over it, said one Republican familiar with the situation.”   source

Like any good western movie, there has to be a shootout at some point. An OK Corral to wow the potential voters, as it were.

“In 2007, Perry endorsed Rudy Giuliani over Romney in the presidential race, in which Castellanos was a Romney adviser. Not only did the Texan pick the New York City mayor over his former gubernatorial colleague, he went the extra step of jabbing at Romney in a book he wrote in 2008 about the Boy Scouts, suggesting the former Massachusetts governor had excluded Scouts who had wanted to volunteer for the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City because he disagreed with a Supreme Court decision allowing the group to ban gay Scoutmasters. (Salt Lake officials reportedly denied that anyone who wanted to pitch in was turned away).” source

The feud has been building for years and next week it’s going to be verbal shotgun time, as each tries to blow the other’s ass away with fiery rhetoric.

“Perry thinks "Romney stands for nothing,” said a Perry confidante. “He’s got no spine, no backbone.”

A longtime Republican activist who knows both men argued that Romney gets the unfair end of criticism, and said that Perry is known to his colleagues as “difficult. He makes lots of demands.”

source

I’ll look forward to watching these two Westerners take pot shots at each other on the campaign trail through the Midwest next week.

Voters have to decide which one is wearing the White hat, and which is wearing the Black hat. I’d say they both wear Black hats, but I’m obviously not going to be voting during the GOP primary process.

Let’s see who rides off into the sunset first…