.Rick Perry doesn't like to be compared to George Bush, but he now has another thing in common: he got pretty bad grades in college. Courtesy of a source who passed along the college transcripts of his Texas A&M years to The Huffington Post, we learned that Perry "rarely earned anything above a C in his courses -- earning a C in U.S. History, a D in Shakespeare, and a D in the principles of economics." We won't fault him for it, but one of his worst courses appears to be a semester of Organic Chemistry, where he got an F. Even accounting for the decades of grade inflation since Perry graduated in 1972, those are pretty below average grades.
But, again like Bush, Perry was up to other things in college. A few days ago the Texas Tribune published detailed look into his A&M life as, in part, a college prankster: he put live chickens in the room of an upperclassman over Christmas break and executed another prank that "involved M-80 firecrackers and an acquired knowledge of the plumbing in A&M buildings." HuffPost notes that the only two A's Perry received were in classes for "world military systems" and "Improv. of Learning."