Perry stumbles over solar firm Solyndra, calls it a country

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) stumbled over Solyndra, mispronouncing the company’s name and calling it a country.

Perry was hitting President Obama for his green energy policy when the slip occurred at a campaign event Sunday in Iowa.

“No greater example of it than this administration sending millions of dollars into the solar industry, and we lost that money," he said. "I want to say it was over $500 million that went to the country Solynda.”

Solyndra is a solar energy company that went bankrupt after receiving over $500 million in federal loan guarantees.

The gaffe was the latest in what has become a pattern of verbal miscues for the Republican presidential candidate.

In an interview with the Des Moines Register’s editorial board last week, Perry struggled to name Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor before he mispronounced her name.

He compounded the error by then saying that there are eight Supreme Court justices instead of nine, although his campaign said he was referencing “a 1962 case known as Abington School District v. Schempp where the court ruled that school-sponsored Bible reading is unconstitutional,” in which the vote was eight to one.

Perry’s most glaring gaffe came at a debate in which he said he would eliminate three federal departments and then was only able to name two.

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