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October 26, 2008 - October 19, 2008

Friday, January 11, 2008

THE BARREL. It keeps coming up. The uncomfortable possibility that the U.S. State Department is a world unto itself, not entirely loyal to the President or even the nation. That's why it's time to lift the veil, in a manner of speaking, and show average Americans the people and practices which are so determinative of what the United States does in the world.

For example, the charge has been made that Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has become a different person than she was as National Security Adviser, that somehow she has been absorbed into a culture which mysteriously alters everyone who encounters it. Where once she was a hardliner about Israel, she has by dint of mere association become yet another apologist for Palestinian terrorism that never ends and never apologizes for itself.

Well, sunshine is always the best antidote for silly rumors. Condoleeza Rice is every bit as shrewd and decisive as she ever was. All that's changed is that thanks to the U.S. State Department's Middle Eastern Divison, she's received the advice of Ahmed Im Ahman, the world's foremost expert on various middle eastern type things. He doesn't care if you went to Stanford and think you know everything. He doesn't even care if you're Madelyn Albright and know you know everything. He can look right up your skirt, so to speak, and see everything you're missing. Thank goodness we have him on staff.


Without Ahmed Im Ahman, there's no chance at all the U.S. would be pressuring Israel to abandon even more of the "occupied Arab lands" President Bush referred to yesterday. And, in all probability, Madelyn Albright would still be on speaking terms with the U.S. Secretary of State.

But the State Department has a reach that extends beyond its own secretary. Keeping the President informed is also a high priority. Word is that our current President spends so much time learning about world affairs from State that First Lady Laura is actually jealous. Well, that's hardly the first time the first family has been similarly affected.


Fortunately, the Commander-in-Chief's middle eastern education is in the hands of a great patriot -- Herezade by name -- who has been able through the years to overcome his reflexive Zionist prejudices and introduce him to the nuances of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. We are all going to owe her a huge debt of gratitude when the Palestinians get their new state and establish appropriate relations with Israel in the last year of the Bush Administration. Ali Ali Akbar.

There are those malcontents who would contend that the State Department is actually fiercely partisan. But our research suggests this is largely false. Yes, it's true that Madelyn Albright had a much larger contingent of mideast advisers than the current  secretary, but everyone knows that Democrats are inherently more intellectually curious.


The truth is that exceptions do prove the rule most of the time. Like Bush, President Clinton also had a sole chief adviser on middle eastern affairs, who played the key role in convincing him that persecuting UBL would have done more damage to his presidency than the Jew whore the Republicans positioned to steal his power. If Bill hadn't listened to her, imagine how much damage could have been done. Al Gore might have been President when 9/11 happened. The nation couldn't have survived that eventuality. Thank Allah we had Ashkira to save us -- and thank the U.S. State Department.


The important thing for everyone to know is that the State Department never sleeps. While all the rest of us pay little or no attention to the world at large, they are always doing whatever it takes to keep presidents, cabinet secretaries, generals, admirals, vice presidents, senators, and congressmen informed about key issues in the world. They're smarter than everyone and ready for anything. They even know how to keep Cheney up to date.


They keep the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs happy.


They're even prepared for a Hillary administration.


According to our sources, they're working double and triple ovetime to be able to handle the unique demands of a Huckabee or Obama administration.


Truthfully, you can help. All they need is certain knowledge of the deepest depravity either or both of them yearn for. Then they can adjust U.S. foreign policy briefings accordingly.

Wish them luck. They're going to need it.

And so will we.

THE BOOK OF ANDREW. The last gasp of the hard left during the Reagan era was the Nuclear Freeze Movement, which sought to perpetuate the dying Soviet Union by insisting that the U.S. unilaterally abandon its own nuclear weapons upgrade programs in the 1980s. When the movement failed, the communist bloc crumbled and exposed the ugly failures of socialism as a modern system of government. Since then, the world's leftists have latched onto a seemingly different cause, the rescue of planet earth from the depredations of man-made global warming.

It's a clever stratagem on the whole. Most of the vocabulary is different, which enables the true believers to sweep millions of gullible neophytes into their cause. What remains the same is the real purpose of their efforts, which is to destroy the capitalist economic system. But there's also a significant weakness of the most current incarnation of leftist philosophy; this time, they're more or less forced to admit what they never did under Marxism, that far from loving the masses, they actually despise the masses and seek to punish them. Underneath their rationalism, they're as pitiless and robotic as the Old Testament prophet Amos in their antipathy to sinful mankind.

Their leaders speak of a "carbon freeze," but what they really yearn for is a Civilization Freeze, an abrupt termination of the technological progress which has doubled human lifespans in the last 500 years and multiplied our population as a species by  many orders of magnitude. Their version of the hated Holy Bible's concept of original sin is our very existence. Once you understand this basic truth, you'll see it running like a malevolent thread through all their policies and positions. Here are just two examples, notable only for their currency.

 In what should be good news, an Indian manufacturing company has announced a breakthrough in automotive design which will allow people in the Third World to buy a car for approximately $2500:


If you hate people and civilization itself, obviously the masses should be denied individual transport. It's the same logic which argues that undeveloped nations in Africa, Asia, and South America should be denied the life-saving benefits of electrification unless it can be implemented with ridiculously expensive and inefficient technologies like windmills and solar panels. The real problem isn't really climate change; it's the annoying persistence of the human race.

It's also the same logic behind Madelyn Albright's so-called liberal view of world politics. On the same day U.N. fatcats were anguishing about the possibility an Indian mom and dad might be able to speed their sick baby to the hospital in a car of their own, the pudgy old secretary of state was selling her book to the faithful via interview observations like these:


Wow. Wow. The "problem" is the spread of "knowledge." That's what creates "disquiet and anger." Obviously, the only effective answer is to get rid of "knowledge" and the "information technology" which spreads it like a virus through the most worthless species on our sorry-ass planet.

Failing that ideal, we'll probably have to settle for the more gradual human attrition that would improve the planet "if we were all poor." The good thing is, there's no secret about how we can achieve that masochistic goal. We just freeze civilization in its tracks and let natural disasters, famines, and mosquitoes do the rest. North Korea, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Communist China have done lots of groundbreaking work in this area. Time we benefited from their research, don't you think?

We could be down to a billion people flat in less than a generation. If we really work at it. Utopia, I mean.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

The Couch Campaigner

      I know I was supposed to be covering the Presdential campaign, but I got a late start. The end of the NFL season was pretty absorbing for a change, and suddenly it seemed like all the movies were being touted as “one of the year’s very best.” (It took me a few wasted tickets to figure out the year they were talking about was 2000.) Besides, all the polls were saying you hadn’t gotten too interested in the campaign either, and why should I wear myself out writing a bunch of great stuff about something you didn’t notice yet?
      So now I’m on the case, and it looks like exciting things are underway. The last time I checked in, George W. and Al Bore were walking away with the major party nominations, and Pat Buchenwald was getting ready to throw the big enchilada to the Dems by running on the Reformed Party ticket. 
     Who would have thought everything would get so different so fast? Pat Buchenwald is embroiled in a tougher race than the one he walked out on—competing with the likes of Donald Trumph, Jesus Ventura, Warren Beady (sort of), and the ghostly spectre of Ross Pyro. George W. did the impossible by spending $50 million in New Hamshire to get his ass kicked by a white-haired Viet Nam POW. And Al Bore turned the solid gold advantage represented by the best economy in 3 billion years into a skin-of-the-teeth victory over a washed-up basketball player with a heart condition.
       It almost makes me wish I’d been paying more attention. How about you? Maybe you’d settle for a brief explanation of how this all came about? Let’s hope so. Here goes.
      Pat Buchenwald got into trouble because he figured the Reformed Party would swoon for a famous, college-educated (semi)politician who had been on TV more than Ross Pyro. Like most of the ‘inside the beltway’ intellectuals, he forgot that college-educated doesn’t impress Amerians very much any more, since everybody in the whole government went to Yail, and anyone with half an eye can see they’re not too damn smart. 
     And when you leave out the college-educated part, suddenly Pat Buchenwald isn’t the top gun anymore, because here comes Jesus “The Booby” Ventura, who’s been seen on television by probably fifty times as many people as Pat, and he’s been elected a governor to boot, even if it is in one of those nothing states that start with an “M.” 
     When everybody in the media rushed to interview Jesus about being Presdent, people kind of lost track of Pat, and when all those interviews made people start thinking that maybe it wouldn’t be too smart to elect a bald idiot as Presdent, that gave Donald Trumph the idea to run, because why else did he spend all those years combing his side hair over the big empty spot on top of his head? Investments like that have to be cashed in sometime, don’t they? 
     After the Reformed Party folks didn’t actually throw up at the thought of a whoremaster like Trumph as the nominee, Warren Beady got the idea that he might have a shot too. And does anybody think Ross Pyro paid all that money to set up his own political party just to see a bunch of squabbling egomaniacs rip it to pieces? That scratching sound you hear is Ross's feet digging in for a last-minute sprint. With all this going on, who’s paying any attention to Pat? Maybe black and silver uniforms would help...
    George W. got into trouble because after about six months of being polled every half hour, average Amerians finally realized that the Bush who was running this time was the son of the one they dimly remembered. Which was a completely different thing, of course. Completely. If John McKane had realized it six months earlier, he would have gotten into the race a lot sooner—probably six months sooner. As it was, he had a lot of catching up to do. After six months of voting for him in telephone polls, average Amerians were starting to feel like they knew George W. almost as well as they knew his dad. 
       In fact, it wasn’t until the mass media started telling people how much average Amerians admired John McKane for all his honesty about whatever it was he was being so honest about that they realized how much they had always admired McKane before George W. distracted them by pretending to be his own father. 
      All in all, there was lots of realizing going on, and most of it got completed in time to give George W. a good thumping in New Hamshire. None of the other Republians was ever in the race because the only thing they talked about was abortion, which is the one subject nobody anywhere wants to hear another word about. Thus, the first primary resulted in the two-man race we have today.
     Al Bore got into trouble by being himself for many months of campaigning. Thankfully, an army of political consultants figured this out in time to convince him that the best strategy was to run as someone else, someone like, say, Bill Clitton. And so they managed to come up with a perfect patsy for Al Bore to run against, so that the Vice Presdent would have someone other than himself to lie about during the campaign. 
     Then it turned out that Bill Broadley was almost too perfect a patsy—he campaigned so lethargically and inertly that Al barely noticed him and kept on telling all his best lies about himself. As a result, New Hamshire was a closer vote than anyone wanted, especially Bill Broadley, who had been given to understand that he’d be able to go home after the first primary. When he realized that the Bore campaign had been lying about this too, he got really steamed and started hurling accusations about everything under the sun, which made everyone nervous. 
     First, Broadley charged that he had a debilitating heart condition, then he claimed that he was too much of an impotent intellectual to have the guts for Presdential campaigning, and then he asserted that if elected he would make the government pay everybody’s doctor bill forever, thus bankrupting the country. 
     In response, the Bore campaign counter-charged that Al Bore would pay everybody’s doctor bill too, and that it wouldn’t bankrupt the country because the Democratics would raise taxes on the Republians to pay for it, even if Broadley did get elected. Faced with such negative tactics, Broadley quit trying to weasel out of the race and consented to stay in a while longer. Having dodged a very big bullet, a much relieved Al Bore finally started to get the hang of Presdential campaigning and began telling only the lies his campaign managers ordered him to.
    All caught up? Good. I promise I’ll be checking in more often from here on in. Okay?

March 3, 2000

The Couch Campaigner

Bush is done! McKane is done!
No, Bush is done

        It’s getting confusing here on the couch. If I didn’t know better, I’d think the mass media don’t have a clue about what’s going on in the campaign.
        First, John McKane blows out all the poll predictions in a giant drubbing of Bush in New Hamshire. The whole country starts going nuts for McKane. He makes the covers of all the news magazines. The polls which had shown Bush with a 20 point lead in South Carelina are suddenly showing him behind McKane. 
        The pundits explain that Bush’s people had always been dead wrong to think of South Carelina as a conservative “firewall” for their man. Actually, they say, Carelina doesn’t belong to the “Old South” anymore. They’re tied into the UnderNet like everyone else in the country, which means they don’t have any morals anymore either, and so they’re not quite as enthusiastic about the politics of a Republian God who’s planning Armageddon for Satan’s anti-Anti-Choice minions. 
        What’s more, South Carelina is also overflowing with veterans, which means that George W. might remind them more of Clitton than his dad, and McKane could attract their votes just by waving the (Amerian) flag a little and swapping some raunchy war stories. 
        Even worse, the way the pundits explain it, the South Carelina primary is also open to independents and Democratics, which there aren’t supposed to be any of in the state, except that there are, and they seem to like the looks of a Republian who talks like a Clitton Democratic. And the whole time the pundits are explaining all this, the polls stay close, and the Bush campaign seems to be bracing itself for another, possibly fatal, defeat.
        Then the South Carelina primary takes place. Bush wins it convincingly. The news magazines put George W. on their covers and talk about how tough he was to come back and put it to McKane that way. The pundits take to the air to explain that during the last frantic days in South Carelina, the honest and highly principled John McKane had done some pretty negative advertising, going so far as to compare George W. to Clitton. 
        It also turns out that the South Carelina folks aren’t quite as finished with being “Old South” as everyone thought—as the experts could have deduced if they’d paid attention to their own tirades about the Confederate flag flying over the capitol. But, anyhow, the folks were still “Old South’ enough to remember that a candidate who talks about being positive and honorable probably shouldn’t compare his opponent to the scummiest presdent in Amerian history—unless maybe he isn’t quite so positive and honorable as he says he is. 
        Any of the South Carelinians who were slow to figure this out were nevertheless able to get some help from the Bush campaign, who called everybody in the state once an hour and preempted all regular programming on TV to explain just how unprincipled it was for John McKane to do negative campaigning.
        With South Carelina now safely out of the way, the Republians run up to Mishigan to explain to the voters how negative the other side is being. Since Bush has proven to be so much more effective at this than McKane, the pundits explain, the Arizonia senator is now in real trouble. Besides, the Republian governor of Mishigan has made this primary a vote of confidence for his own administration and is using the whole Republian machine to win it for George W. 
        The worst news of all for McKane is that he seems to be losing his famous temper quite a bit, and he’s no longer sounding like a brave, war-hero reformer. What he's sounding like is a sore loser.
        The Mishigan primary vote takes place right on schedule, and McKane wins big. The pundits race to the talk shows to say, of course, obviously, this was inevitable. The governor of Mishigan is unpopular, and everyone in the City of Destroit—all Democratics, of course—voted in the primary, for John McKane, just to piss off the governor. What this means, according to the pundits, is that the whole phenomenon of Democratics voting in Republian primaries will make the race for the nomination into a real dogfight, one that could go all the way to the Convention. 
        Next up are primaries in the Commonwealth of Vagina and Wishington State, both considerably more moderate in their politics than South Carelina, which is the only place Bush has actually scored a victory at the polls. Time, the pundits tell us, to hold our breath.
        So, naturally, Bush stomps McKane to pieces in Vagina and Wishington. It turns out that the Republians have decided to battle the Democratics by voting unanimously for the candidate the Democratics hate the most—George W.
        Now, we’re on the brink of Super Tuesday. The pundits are still busy explaining what happened in Vagina and Wishington, and what will happen in Newyork, Californica, Uhio, and a bunch of other states. But I’ve stopped listening for a while. My head hurts. Maybe I’ll just wait for their explanation of what happened after it’s all over.

Monday, January 07, 2008

PUNDITRY. So Mrs. IP said, "If you're going to keep pontificating about presidential candidates, you probably better watch the Republican debate in New Hampshire," and I said, "Don't be ridiculous. The Sci Fi Channel is doing their fourteenth consecutive Monster Marathon, and I can't afford to miss a single one of the no-star movies they've racked up for my filmic edification."

I won't tell you what Mrs IP said in response, but I swear she actually enjoyed watching me watch all 16 hours of what passes for political discussion in the Granite State. When it was finally over, she threw back her head and laughed out loud. "I can't wait," she said between guffaws. "I can't wait to see your brilliant analysis of what these geniuses had to say."

My riposte was devastating (of course) and she eventually slunk away in defeat... you know how they always giggle and titter like that when you've been too witty for them to have any real comeback... and then I sat down to review my notes. They were pretty damn insightful, as always, and I just wish the pug hadn't chewed up my reading glasses again, because I know you'd all have been mightily impressed by my reactions. However, I can still remember some of what went on and I'd like to offer the following acute observations:

- Whoever is cutting John McCain's hair needs to be waterboarded, probably to death.

- The smartest thing anybody said was Fred's line about having John Wayne beat up Chuck Norris.

- Ron Paul should try not attending debates more often. It makes him seem almost intelligent.

- Rudy Giuliani was once mayor of New York. Did you know that?

- Is it just me or would Mike Huckabee's spiel work better if somebody slapped him right across the face after every sentence?

- Mitt would actually win every debate if he didn't look so much like an actor playing the President on an afternoon soap opera.

Truthfully, I think I know how to decide the Republication race. Mitt should hire some thug to break his nose. Or at least get the chick up top to do his makeup. If he weren't so damn smooth and flawless, us ordinary folks might finally realize that he makes mincemeat of every other candidate whenever they go head to head.

Don't tell Hugh Hewitt I said that. He's obnoxious enough already.

Now that I've told you about the debate, maybe you could do me a favor and tell me what I missed on the Sci Fi Channel. I'm sure it was much more entertaining.

THE ENDLESS AFTERMATH. What is it with these guys? Personally, I've reached the conclusion that non-smokers in their eighties have to be assumed to be Alzheimer's sufferers. It's not their fault, of course. How could they know that the worst possible course for a human being planning an excessively long life is to be a vice-free prig? But I do fault institutions like the Washington Post, which have so little regard for the legacies of the helplessly vulnerable aged that they're willing to exploit them for ephemeral partisan gain. Shame on WAPO for printing this senile rant by George McGovern:


Everything McGovern says is wrong. American prestige is not at an historic low, or else Canada, France, Germany, the U.K., and South Korea would not have elected pro-American governments within the last couple of years. The U.S. elections in 2000 and 2004 were not questionable; even the recounts conducted by the liberal media proved beyond doubt that George W. Bush carried Florida in 2000 and thus the nation. The war in Iraq is not illegal, even if you want to make the case that it was ill-advised. Saddam repeatedly violated the terms of the peace concluded after Desert Storm by attacking the American Air Force, with the result that even Bill Clinton occasionally responded with military might, completely legally. Just like the GWB invasion. The Democrat-controlled U.S. Congress, despite obsessively constant efforts to prove otherwise, has never been able to demonstrate that the Bush administration is guilty of lying; otherwise, the impeachment Senator McGovern desires would already have occurred. Count on it. And the Johns-Hopkins study McGovern cites was about as far from "careful" as a supposedly academic venture can be.

But dammit. He's an old old man. Of course he's bitter about what happened to his own political aspirations. He sits on the veranda with his cup of decaffeinated tea and he fulminates about what might have been. Understandable. He lost in a landslide to Richard Nixon. What bigger fool can there be in 20th century American political history? If he were a wiser man, he'd have made his peace by now with the superlatively humiliating defeat that ended his public career. But he's not a wise man. He's a typical infantile Democrat. So there's no reason to hope he could actually learn from his life's experience. But it's unforgivable that the editors of the Washington Post would savage his dignity and privacy by printing his last demented ramblings.

For God's sake. Let the man lose his marbles in private, where only the nurse has to bear witness to his mental incontinence.

It's a sad day. A sad sad day.

MORE BAD NEWS. Nothing sums up the problem the Republicans are facing better than this entry from Mark Levin at NRO's The Corner. Here's the whole entry:


Really?

The terrible truth is that the Republican pundit class, including Mark Levin and Missouri-born Rush Limbaugh, has no way of comprehending the extent to which the Republican Party is being hijacked by idiot fundamentalists. In fact, I listened to Limbaugh today. From beginning to end, he was assailed by incredibly polite Huckabee supporters who were telling him to go to hell, but not in so many words. Because they were so polite. They don't care about actual politics anymore. Their messiah has arrived and they'll slay their own mothers and fathers to get him elected.

The radicalization process that has stolen the Democrat Party from its FDR/HST/JFK roots has now infected the Republicans as well. The Dems are going to nominate Jesse Jackson Lite, and the Repubs are going to nominate Amy Semple MacPherson. Worse, Mike Huckabee (MacPherson) is the most gifted natural politician this country has seen since Bill Clinton. Right now, he's loose in the secondary and running wild. How many governors from the worst state in the union can we survive?

The sensible mainstream in both parties is fucked. And that's a fact. Dark days lie ahead.

Mark Levin. If you want to understand what's going on, you'd better email InstaPunk with your questions. We love dogs too. But we don't confuse that affection with political acuity.

Friday, January 04, 2008

PSAYINGS.5A.19. Thanks, Iowa. Now we know what you want -- a wholesale flight from reality into the promised land of pious, empty rhetoric. And I'm not talking just about Huckabee. He may thump the Bible more than Obama, but they're both interpreting the term "bully pulpit" as literally as the Hawkeyes interpret the Book of Genesis. Here are the two victory speeches. As you listen, close your eyes and try to decide which one would make us sicker of his preachifying over four or eight years.


I call it a toss-up. It entirely depends on whether you're more nauseated by smarmy, self-satisfied religiosity or dreary incantational anaphora delivered in tent-revival dialect.

If that's really what you want, fine. Go for it. But shouldn't there be some content besides platitudes about hope and change and a new day in America? For example, I'd feel a lot better about both these gents if they'd demonstrated a particle of knowledge about a country that didn't even exist when the boilerplate in their stump sermons received its first halleluiahs from a Sunday congregation. Maybe that's why Huckabee doesn't know that Pakistan lies to the east of Afghanistan. And maybe that's why Obama thinks Bush was stupid to invade Iraq (pop. 27 million) instead of Pakistan (pop. 150 million), 40 percent of whom admire Osama bin Laden, to win the war on terror without needless loss of life. (I admit there's no explaining why Hillary Clinton knows nothing whatever about the current political situation in Pakistan, but that's a different kettle of fish.)


I understand the yearning of many Americans to return to a simpler time, before 9/11 and all the unseemly ruckus it has caused, but let's not go all the way back to 1860, or even 1960. Please.

That old-time religion is a hymn, not a political platform. If we forget that, the time we're really going to return to is the administration of Jimmy Carter. Which, if memory serves, didn't result in too many hosannas.

A RENAISSANCE OF BELIEF. This is a reality check for all you earnest Huckabee supporters. You may think you're striking a blow for the religious right by flocking to his banner, but that deep, consuming impetus you're feeling is not so much the victorious charge of crusaders as the mob lunacy of lemmings. If you succeed in nominating Huckabee, you will be putting the sword to your own political influence in this country for the remainder of your lifetimes. I kid you not.

I'm going to tell you the things no one else is willing to say. The Democrats won't say them because the Huck-a-Boom is, to them, an orgasmically delicious confirmation of all the worst things they have ever thought about you, and they will be ecstatically pleased to watch you destroy yourselves in his behalf. The Republicans -- even the staunchest conservatives who have supported your causes in the past -- won't say them because they don't want what the liberals think about you to be accurate, and they are deathly afraid that it is. Their rapidly fading hope is that you'll come to your senses before the awful truth has to be dumped on your heads like a 55-gallon drum of ice-cold gatorade. In short, they're afraid of pissing you off. But I don't want the liberals to win, and I don't care if I hurt your feelings. Because you're being dopes.

There are only two possibilities about who Mike Huckabee is. The first is that he's a sincere evangelical Christian who regards the world in the simple terms he says he does. The second is that he's a cunning politician who was born and raised among people of faith like you and has learned how to exploit your faith to advance his own career. Both of these possibilities are disasters waiting to happen.

If he's the good-hearted preacher who just happened to become governor of Arkansas by an accident of circumstance rather than calculated ambition, he's in way over his head. For example, when Huckabee claimed he was receiving foreign policy advice from John Bolton, he was either misrepresenting the facts or being absurdly naive. No matter how good he is at heart, the United States and the world at large can't afford a president who thinks he is learning foreign policy via email. And to the extent that you are willing to overlook this kind of blunder, you are telling the 70 percent of your fellow citizens who don't believe a literal interpretation of the Bible is the best credential for political leadership that your powers of judgment are nil. Huckabee the Preacher will be mocked and ridiculed and manipulated into the worst electoral disaster in the history of the Republican Party. Have you learned nothing about Democrats? They will be absolutely ruthless about making him indistinguishable in every way from Gomer Pyle.

On the other hand, Huckabee might be an absolutely ruthless politician himself, a nominally Republican version of that other successful Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton. If he is, he could actually succeed in winning the presidency. Is this your secret hope, that he is some kind of combination Machiavellian-Christian, venal enough to do the job and yet moral enough to do it right? Forget it. That's a one-in-a-billion shot. If he has the ambition and spine to be a strong president, he is far more likely to be a Huey Long than an Abraham Lincoln -- corrupt, vindictive, hypocritical, power-mad, and criminally sly rather than intelligent. And, by the way, what are the charges that continue to attach to Huck's governorship? Corrupt, vindictive, personally greedy, tax-happy and... uh, weak on crime and immigration. Because the other likely version of a Machiavellian-Christian politician is Jimmy Carter. A weak, small-minded micro-manager whose insecurities and self-righteous conceits do appalling harm in the name of good.

But a Carter-like Huckabee will be far worse for the country than even Carter was. The insatiable destruction machine that is the Democratic Party will not be there to conceal and explain away his incompetencies, but to highlight them and pin them on the ignorant, reactionary yokels who brought him to power in the first place. If you think the left hates Bush, wait till the president is a graduate of a Baptist Bible college instead of Yale and Harvard.

By the end of a mercifully one-term Huckabee presidency, you will be lucky if all the more fundamentalist flavors of Christianity haven't been outlawed as completely as the American Communist Party. And worse than that will be the laughter, which will echo in your ears, and those of your children and their children, for all that remains of American history. Worst of all, conservatism itself will be stone cold dead as a political force in this country.

My final point is that mine is not an extreme view. Every conservative who does not share your exact religious viewpoint feels the same way about this that I do. The only difference between me and the east-coast conservative pundits who opine on Fox News and other mass media outlets is that they don't believe you'd really go through with such a totally self-destructive campaign -- and I do believe it.

Know this, though. If you do, we will never forgive you. And the country will, most likely, never recover.

Bottom Line: Mike Huckabee is a joke. Whether he turns out to be a funny joke like Governor Gatling or a deadly joke like Huey Long is largely in your hands. Try not to blow it.

ALWAYS RIGHT. We earned massive uninterest when we reluctantly endorsed John McCain for the presidency last month. But given our record of being right about (almost) everything, it seemed we should share this blog entry from a genuine New Hampshire blogger who got to meet most of the candidates. Maybe he's as much of an idiot as Instapunk, but, well, here you go:


By all means, take a good, long, close look at his blog. I'm not sure that those who dislike McCain can ever warm up to him. I suspect it's a generational thing (which is not good). I don't have to like him to respect him -- or to accept that even in person we might not like each other -- while acknowledging that of all the people in the race, he's the one I'd reluctantly, finally, and ultimately willingly trust to negotiate the dangerous rapids we face. But then I grew up with a bunch of those old intransigent WWII bastards. I'm used to rigid and choleric old men. I know they frequently understand more than they let on. Then they tell you the truth as they see it, which you can sometimes come to terms with and sometimes not. But at least the lines are clearly drawn. I don't expect others to feel the same way. Honestly. But I'm thinking it might be time for an irascible old man to deal with the vicious untrained pups of the New Age, whether they're Putin, Ahdumjihad, Assad, Ban Ki Moon, Kim Jong Il, Pinyin, Osama bin Laden, or divers Euro-Weeny chihuahuas.

I also think I've figured out his real position on torture. If it has to be done, the President should do it himself. (He's guested on 24. How does that compute with his supposed squeamishness?) It's an old guy thing.

I know Fred is old too. But seeing him lay down the law in Die Hard 2 doesn't quite give me that same feeling. Sorry.

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