Stewart consistently gets it, and is the first big-distribution commentator I know of who has had the spine to tell a right-winger to his face that religious affiliation is the most blatant "lifestyle choice" there is. Nice jab also at proponents of a meritocracy dismissing an entire class of people out of hand while assuming that a status uniquely and exclusively qualifies another class of people (straights) for a particular job (parenting).
Thanks as always to Top!Secret G-woman, who consistently points me to interesting things I go to bed too early to notice.
Romney's out as of today, freeing up McCain and Huckabee to decide whether to make their temporary alliance of convenience a more permanent gig. Let us hope the absence of a common enemy makes them remember that they really don't like each other that much after all.
Hmmmm. Clinton took Arizona, which I wasn't expecting because I didn't pay attention to the rest of the state. I'm pretty sure Obama took Tucson. His end-of-the-night "Our Time Has Come" speech in Chicago was electrifying (two part YouTube presentation below):
Barack Obama. Orator Laureate of the U.S. Is it any wonder all the kids are doing backflips for him? Hell, I'm old and jaded and he's gotten me to believe.
But even before the goosebumps receded, alarm bells were sounding ever so faintly in the back of my head, and most of them were labeled "McCain/Huckabee '08." Those two camps are increasingly looking past their ideological differences to focus on the one thing they can agree on, which is a deep loathing of Mittens Romney. And that would give us a GOP ticket that would allow a lot of people to hold their noses, gaze fixedly at their candidate, and avert their eyes from his running mate.
Think about it. Huckabee brings in the evangelical vote and might be the widget that justifies a vote in the minds of Republicans who don't think McCain's a true conservative (behold the power of a meme completely in contradiction to the man's actual voting record) but are counting on him working himself into a coronary before the first hundred days are up. And GOPers who aren't necessarily enamored with the idea of a Bible-based state but do salivate at the possibility of a new Hundred Years' War can look past the Baptist minister on the ticket, since, after all, he's only the VP. Add to those Republicans the independents who also don't believe McCain's a true conservative but think that's a positive, and are willing to overlook everything Mike Huckabee has ever said except those bits about us needing to be better stewards of the environment, and we might have trouble.
Who fights this combination the best? I gotta think it's Obama. McCain's "maverick" label, despite being a steaming load of bullshit, will be enough for independent and Democratic voters who hate Clinton to convince themselves that it's really not so bad to vote Republican this time around. And Obama has the unassailable moral standing to confront Bomb Bomb on the current war, and the next war he wants to start, and the several lurking beyond that.
Can Clinton pull it off? I am not optimistic. Could Obama really pull it off against a more bombs-more bibles ticket that just might be the ticket away from guilt the not-ready-yet crowd is secretly pining for? I want him to. I want to jump on that hope train and settle back with a drink and watch the country trundle by on the track back to the America he promises. I don't know if I believe in my fellow voters enough to count on it yet.
In honor of the GOP Florida primary today, some actual political content. It's a bit out of date as these things go, but hey, (1) Huckabee's still in the race, and (2) nothing says "Values Voters" like Florida. And vice versa.
In a bid to sew up the Bible-waving, homo-hating, *cough*race-baiting*cough* vote, Mike Huckabee set himself apart from the rest of the GOP field yesterday by going all yee-haw over the Confederate battle flag in first-shots-of-the-Confederacy South Carolina.
"You don't like people from outside the state telling you what to do with your flag," he told an audience in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. "In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell them where to put the pole."
Some southerners are eating this right up, and put together a couple of radio spots touting Huck's charms:
Notice that the ads are paid for by Americans for the Preservation of American Culture, who are working tirelessly to restore public perception of the virtues of our Confederate Forefathers and Southern Heritage as one of the foundations of American Liberty. At least they recognize that the current public perception of their Confederate forefathers and southern heritage--you know, that whole treason, insurrection, and slavery thing--needs a little work. This whole perception concept seems to be news to Huckabee, who's been winking and nodding his way through the backwoods wet dream wish list all week.
Hey, it's just because the dipshit with the Stars 'n' Bars on his pickup is only proud of being from the south, right? He's not really racist. And the people equating gay marriage with bestiality aren't really dehumanizing and demonizing gays, they're just blissfully in love with their own opposite-sex spouses, right? And the guys who want Biblical law enshrined in the Constitution, well, they don't really want Biblical law, just a little bit, just enough to, uh, dehumanize gays and demonize non-Christians and remind Billy Bob Stars 'n' Bars that he's just as equal as anybody else in America, and, nudge nudge, wink wink, maybe just a little more so.
Mike Huckabee is a douchebag. People are starting to notice. Hope they'll notice in a big way if he carries South Carolina.
Might as well pile on while the piling's good. Just in case anyone has forgotten the Huckabee mini-skirt commentary, well, I just happened to come across this tidbit.
That she is completely adorable is irrelevant. Really. No, really.
Gotta hand it to Mike Huckabee--with him, what you see and hear is the unvarnished real deal. As alluded to before, the most troubling thing about him is up for grabs. Is it the content of what he says, or the fact that he blithely says it with no apparent concern for the religious extremism it reveals? A couple of days ago he called for amending the Constitution to bring it in line with what he perceives as God's standards. Yesterday he was asked by Beliefnet.com to clarify that position (via TPM Election Central).
Beliefnet: Do you think that on issues other than marriage and the life of the unborn that the Constitution should be brought into conformity with the Bible, which is what that quote seemed to suggest?
Huckabee: No, I was specifically talking about those two issues. Those were the only two issues I spoke about in the speech, and that was the point. I’m not suggesting that we say, “Okay, the Bible says you should tithe, so now in the Constitution we’re going to amend it to say everyone tithes.”
Got that? He's not an all-in kind of theocrat after all. Whew! He's only calling for codifying the parts of the Bible that would not unduly personally impact him or the rest of his evangelical brethren. Tithing, shellfish, and polyester blends are back on the table, people! And as for the rest of the sticky wickets tossed up by strict Biblical law--stoning unruly children comes to mind--well, that's just crazy talk. So this is proof positive that Mike Huckabee isn't a crazy Dominionist, just a reasonable buffet theocrat.
And how do reasonable pick 'n' choose theocrats conceptualize the people they would like to address in their Constitutional amendments? Why, they do it like this:
Marriage has historically, as long as there’s been human history, meant a man and a woman in a relationship for life. Once we change that definition, then where does it go from there? ...
Well, I don’t think that’s a radical view to say we’re going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal.
There you go. Two men or two women in a committed relationship is the exact equivalent of pedophilia. The exact equivalent of bestiality. Huck's proven himself quite adept in encapsulating staggering ranges of ignorance in very short statements. He would be president, but has so little grasp of American law as to be ignorant of the concept of consent. He would be president, but has so little grasp of non-Western culture as to be ignorant of the existence of one man-three women marriages in other countries as we speak. He is a minister, but is so willfully dismissive of the very holy book he wants to thwack the Constitution upside the head with that he forgets its stories of polygamy--even by some of its heroes.
He wants to be president and plans to get there by playing to the very lowest common denominator among people who call themselves Christian, gleefully bearing false witness to suck in every last vote he can. Why stop at man on dog, Huck? Why not make it man on multiple puppies to complete the bestiality-pedophilia-polygamy trifecta?
Yesterday I called Mike Huckabee a Christian Reconstructionist. That turns out to be inaccurate due to the vagaries of his eschatological orientation (premillenial as opposed to postmillenial). So from now on we'll just be running with "theocrat," which works just fine.
That would be the You Have Got To Be Shitting Me counter, and two and a half states into the primary/caucus season mine is starting to sputter whilst emitting troubling wisps of smoke.
Or maybe that's my head. Hard to tell them apart these days.
"I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution," Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. "But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family."
Set aside, for the moment, the instant failing grades this statement gives him in both US Civics and History of Religion, although that's troubling considering that he claims the dual job titles of governor and ordained minister. Let's just talk about judgment. Did he not realize his microphone was on and that cameras were rolling and that this little thing called Teh Intertubez would grab onto this asinine statement to fling it across Kingdom Come? Worse yet, did he not care?
There's coded language and there's blatant preaching to the choir. Right wingers have become ever bolder in open use of language that's not so coded any more--states' rights and Macaca, anyone?--but when Mike Huckabee stands up and openly calls for a complete rewriting of the country's fundamental document so as to be in line with conservative Christian dogma, apparently without fear of being labeled anything more frightening than "honest," those of us who prefer that our laws be based on secular legal precepts rather than firebrand Bible banging should take notice.
Watch the video and see if you can get through it without reaching through your monitor to strangle both Joe "What can I say? I like him" Scarborough and Mika "wifely submission is the basis of marriage" Brzezinski.
I am of two minds this morning. One thinks that Mike Huckabee suddenly being the Republican front-runner is the best news EVER, since once the campaign starts in earnest, the crap swirling around him on the blogs (his applauding the Southern Baptist convention for telling women to submit to their husbands, his major fundraiser who's in favor of doctors being barred from working on the sabbath and compelled to preach to their patients under a Christian theocracy, his psychotic dog-hanging son) will have to hit the mainstream media and will have to scare even the most brain-dead American voters away from him. Right? Right? Then the other mind chimes in and says, yeah, and all that shit makes him the absolute wet dream of the average brain-dead American voter who has a vague sense of being a persecuted Christian because Bill O'Reilly and innumerable forwarded e-mails from people like my brother tell him he is.
