I certainly wouldn’t call him the worst candidate, but does anyone else in American politics today so perfectly embody the welfare-warfare ethos as Mike Huckabee? I mean, sure, some of the other candidates want to be the Führer, but Huckabee seems as if he’s really running for secretary of health and human services in the Fourth Reich.
“National security isn’t going to mean much if we have a generation of kids so physically incapacitated [by obesity] they can’t go to war.â€
Never mind that he unthinkingly equates “national security” with going to war; I’m more concerned that he’s committing a grave political blunder. Huck should forget the Atkins Diet vs. al-Qaeda angle and offer all those young James Tarantos out there what they really want: perpetual war for perpetual pizza.
Don’t believe the spin about Giuliani writing Iowa off. Nick Bradley looks at campaign appearances vs. votes and finds that Giuliani came in a dismal sixth place, with only 4,000 votes for his 35 appearances. Antiwar and pro-civil liberties candidate Ron Paul, on the other hand, mustered almost three times as many votes with only 75% of Giuliani’s campaign events, putting him second only to Huckabee in votes per event.
“If President Musharraf wishes to stand for election, then he should abide by the same rules that every other candidate will have to follow,” she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer (.pdf) Dec. 28. Two days later, she told ABC’s George Stephanopolous “[Musharraf] could be the only person on the ballot. I don’t think that’s a real election.”
A spokesman for Clinton, Howard Wolfson (one of the most obnoxious public spokesmen ever), said Clinton was referring to Musharraf’s party, not the president himself. However, Hot Air says that “she gets nearly everything about the Pakistani political situation and upcoming elections wrong.” Check his explanation.
In an interview yesterday with the Iowa Quad City Times, GOP Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee defended his ignorance of the Iran NIE report release when asked about it on the campaign trail:
“The point I’m trying to make is that, on the campaign trail, nobody’s going to be able, if they’ve been campaigning as hard as we have been, to keep up with every single thing, from what happened to Britney last night to who won ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ â€
Huckabee said that the NIE report question was “an ambush question.”
“The whole perception was based on an ambush question on the NIE report. From there, it was like, ‘Wow.’ That was released at 10 o’clock in the morning. At 5:30 in the afternoon, somebody says, ‘Have you read the report?’ Maybe I should’ve said, ‘Have you read the report?’ President Bush didn’t read it for four years; I don’t know why I should read it in four hours.â€
It may come as no shock that Ron Paul has been excluded from the upcoming presidential debate in New Hampshire sponsored by FOX News. They said the “trailer” where they plan to hold the debate was not big enough to fit all the candidates. (However, Ron Paul is a fairly small man, physically.) So they decided to exclude two candidate whose poll showings were not sufficient — yes, all before any real vote is cast. The link below gives the details. The real issue, however, is whether any candidate should be omitted from the debate. After all, the point of having various candidates present is not simply to give people a chance to decide on the candidate to vote for but to raise issues. Is it not newsworthy that the Republican Party has abandoned its traditional concern for individual liberty, small government and Constitutional limits? Who but Ron Paul will raise this issue? When news organizations show little regard for exposing people to ideas they don’t already know they are not fulfilling their responsibilities. The idea of news is NEW information — not the same recycled garbage about who is running negative ads and so forth.
Contrary to what I say in this morning’s column, it looks increasingly likely that the assassination of Benazir Bhutto is the work, not of Al Qaeda, but of elements within the Pakistani government itself. Not necessarily Gen. Pervez Musharraf, but of a faction within the military that is, perhaps, getting ready to dump Musharraf and assume power directly.
To begin with, forbidding an autopsy is just a bit suspicious, wouldn’t you say? Not to mention the offer by the CIA to provide Bhutto with electronic jammers that stop belt bombs from going off and guard against car bombs – which the government refused. Hmmmm ….
As one friend with CIA connections said: “It is suspected that the security detail itself and possibly the intelligence service ISI were somehow involved. No one believes that Musharraf would have been dumb enough to be involved directly, but ISI might be playing a more complex game, and have a candidate in mind for taking over if Musharraf fails to stay in power.â€
I was wrong about this: Pakistan is in a lot worse shape than I imagined. However, I was not wrong about the proper US policy: This is just more evidence that US intervention, in this instance, is hopeless: when the folks we are backing (with a $10 billion aid package) are knocking off the opposition so blatantly – I mean, just look that that video! – without regard either for international opinion or the interests of their American sponsors, it’s time to cut bait and shove off. (Of course, you can bet that our Special Forces are poised to seize Pakistan’s nukes if and when the government falls in the face of a popular uprising: in which case, things will get very messy …)
