Peter Wehner, who must hold the Guinness record for being wrong about stuff, is getting all concern troll on Mike Huckabee because the Huckster likes the baby Jesus too much. First of all, it’s Christmastime and you can’t love the baby Jesus too much. Secondly, when a former deputy assistant to President Bush goes out of his way to bash a candidate on Christmas Eve, you can be sure the Establishment has no love for the Huckmobile.
And for those of us who are Christian, there is an important context to bear in mind: Jesus’s entire ministry was directed against the pretensions of earthly power, and Christianity is trans-political, beholden to no party and no ideology. The City of Man and the City of God are different, and we should respect and honor those differences.
Mike Huckabee, by all accounts a faithful Christian, may not have crossed any bright lines yet — but he’s edging close to them. He should pull back now, before his political ambitions injure what he claims to care about, and undoubtedly does care about, most.
Funny how political Christianity isn’t so funny when practiced by a politician you oppose, eh Wehner?
It seems the Wehner is afraid that Huckabee is one of those weirdos who actually believe what they are saying instead of using religion as a cover for an economic elite. When the GOP stirred up the weirdos, to use Ralph Reed’s terminology, they never thought that they would not be able to control them.
What really scares folks like Wehner is that Huckabee is smooth enough to run off with the Republican Party, which for the economic elite GOP would be a disaster.
“religion as a cover for an economic elite”
Yes, as in Bush II presumably. But I think racism still has a lot of appeal as a front issue for the Republican elites, as in Reagan’s day. We can only hope that this time around, the opposition takes up anti-immigration more strongly, which is just an expression of Hispanophobia, another Republican hate issue.
If there’s a hereafter, H.L. Mencken has got to be laughing his ass off!
Oh man, I am looking forward to a long bruising primary battle between the religious right and the monied establishment. It looks like the establishment candidate may very well be McCain, which should give us a rehash of all those fun anti-evangelical quotes from him in 2000.
With any luck this will be a year of painful acrimony and revealed hypocrisy for the Republicans.
An interesting read is how the German industrialists settled on backing Hitler over other rising stars on the right side of the political spectrum. And how things went so wrong when Hitler overextended things. If he hadn’t invaded the USSR he probably could have patched things up with Great Britain and had a pretty good empire. Things sort of tumbled out of control with that whole Jew thing.
There’s crazy and there’s crazy. Dubya isn’t quite the psychopath that Hitler was, but his personal enjoyment of torture was unnecessary for securing the Iraqi oil. While Huckabee can churn up the true believers, if he ever got anywhere near the levers of power with his wacky fair tax and his creationism and such so that he could actually push us into an intellectual dark age/depression the CIA would have to shoot him to protect investments. Or at least wing him, like they did to Reagan. That’s how it works.
CSPAN re-ran a panel from November with Frank Luntz & George Latoff yesterday. Frank “Mr. Prediction” Luntz gaffawed when someone asked him what he thought Huckabee’s chances were. Nice to see the wordsmith himself rewarded today with the product he designed.