Hack Of The Day

Preacher turned Governor turned Presidential Candidate turned millionaire political hack Mike Huckabee knows why the massacre at Shady Hook Elementary School happened - his god was pissed off.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee attributed the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in part to restrictions on school prayer and religious materials in the classroom.

"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News, discussing the murder spree that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, CT that morning. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"
Law enforcement has released few details on the alleged gunman, but Huckabee suggested that the separation of church and state may have spurred his rampage.

So his angry god allowed 20 young children to be killed  because it was not getting enough attention.  Sorry Mike, I want no part of such a god.  I am sad to see what you have become.  When you first came on the national scene I didn't agree with your religious views but you seemed to be a populist kind if nice guy.  Those millions you get from FOX have turned you into a Pat Robertson with a bigger congregation.
Update:
Great post by Tom Levenson at Balloon Juice:

In other words: Twenty-eight deaths, including the murder of twenty kids, was the fault not of the shooter, nor of a gun lobby that portrays military weapons as household tools. Rather, said Huckabee, it was your fault and mine for having failed to appease his angry god by public worship in school.
Saying so is to implicate not just America at large in the crime. It also adds up to a claim that those involved in the Sandy Hook Elementary School in particular were complicit in this massacre, for the banishment of one deity or another occured in that particular school too. Lost a kid? Too bad. Shoulda prayed harder; shoulda held up a cross; shoulda, coulda, sorry old chum.
I can’t begin to write the rage and disgust I feel for that sanctimonious shit. (Whether the word “shit” in that sentence applies to the man or the thought I’ll leave it to the reader to decide.) I want to say that it seems to me that there is a special place in hell Mike Huckabee.

A stop Romney movement?

The Mitt Romney campaign is upset.

"Unfortunately, this is what Senator McCain's inside Washington ways look like: he cut a backroom deal with the tax-and-spend candidate he thought could best stop Governor Romney's campaign of conservative change.

"Governor Romney had enough respect for the Republican voters of West Virginia to make an appeal to them about the future of the party based on issues. This is why he led on today's first ballot. Sadly, Senator McCain cut a Washington backroom deal in a way that once again underscores his legacy of working against Republicans who are interested in championing conservative policies and rebuilding the party."

So what was this backroom deal?
Huckabee Wins West Virginia GOP Contest in Second Round, With Help From McCain

Mike Huckabee won the first of 21 states being contested by the Republican presidential candidates on Super Tuesday, pulling out a victory in the West Virginia Republican convention.

Huckabee won in the second round of voting, even though Mitt Romney led after the first round. The former Arkansas governor won with 51.5 percent to Romney’s 47.4 percent, pulling ahead after John McCain’s delegates apparently defected to his side.

The convention had to go into a second round of voting after no candidate took a clear majority the first time. Texas Rep. Ron Paul was knocked out, and Huckabee, Romney and McCain moved forward.

Paul finished fourth with 10 percent among the 1,133 participating delegates in the first round, while Romney took 41 percent and Huckabee took 33 percent. McCain, who started the day in New York City before heading to California, reached the second round with 15 percent.

But before Huckabee’s surprising turnaround in the second round, McCain delegates told FOX News they had been instructed by the campaign to throw their support to Huckabee.

Sorry Mitt, politics is a contact sport - tackle football not flag football. If you are afraid of getting your perfect hair messed up maybe you should take your millions and go home.

Republican Leader Board

If we ignore Ron Paul the two candidates the Republican establishment least likes are in the lead.

The senator from Arizona is the front-runner in the battle for the Republican presidential nomination, according to the first national poll taken after the New Hampshire primary.

McCain has the support of 34 percent of registered Republicans in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey out Friday. That's a 21-point jump from the last CNN/Opinion Research poll, taken in December, well before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary earlier this month.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who won the Iowa Republican caucuses, is in second place in the new survey, with 21 percent of those registered Republicans polled supporting him for the GOP nomination.

Rudy Giuliani follows with 18 percent, a drop of six points from the December poll, when the former New York City mayor was the front-runner.

"Only McCain gained support among Republicans nationally. McCain's now the clear Republican front-runner," said Bill Schneider, CNN senior political analyst.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is in fourth place, with the backing of 14 percent of registered Republicans, with former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee at 6 percent, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas at 5 percent, and Rep. Duncan Hunter of California at 1 percent.

Now the wingnuts over at the National Review are really upset. Mark R. Levin documents why John McCain just simply isn't crazy enough for the "real" conservatives. Well Mark perhaps the US voters have had more than enough crazy.

And what about Mitt Romney? He is depending on a win in Michigan to keep his hopes alive. Daniel Gross of Newsweek explains why that probably won't happen.

The night of the living dead

I'm not normally a big fan of Howard Kurtz but his piece today on the media gasbags and the New Hampshire election is a well documented look at how the....
Media Blew It Again

At the outset, the pundits seemed ticked that their expected story line--an Obama blowout--was failing to materialize.

What about those pre-election polls we all based our blather on?

When the cable networks couldn't predict at 8 p.m. that Hillary Clinton would lose, the commentators began wondering if she would declare herself the Comeback Kid--as her husband did 16 years ago--if she lost by "only" a few points.

As the evening dragged on, the commentators had to consider the possibility that Hillary's "showing of vulnerability," as Tom Brokaw put it, might have helped her, and that Bill Clinton might have boosted her chances after all. In other words, that the coverage had missed the point.

This was delicious. The coverage had been so out of control there was speculation about when Hillary might have to drop out. Polls giving Barack Obama an 8- or 10-point lead were accepted as fact. The news surrounding the former first lady had been uniformly negative for days. She's done everything wrong, Obama has done everything right. She got too emotional in the diner. People just didn't like her. She campaigned in boring prose and Obama in soaring poetry (to use her analogy). Bill was hurting her. A campaign shake-up was on the way. An era was ending. Some pundits were predicting a 20-point Obama margin.

And then the voters actually went to the polls.

The result: Dewey Defeats Truman.

He then documents the "blathering" of the last several months. That includes the death notice for John McCain several months ago and Hillary's death notice just a couple of days ago.

Yes, the real losers in New Hampshire weren't the candidates that lost but the pompous denizens of television and the print media. And what are they saying tonight? Tim Russert says they are side open races - no front runners. Over at FOX the wingnut "all stars" were conceding it might be a race between Huckabee and McCain. Boy that has to hurt.

End of the coalition

Jack Balkin points out what we have we have been saying here that the coalition that has resulted in Republican wins since 1980 is all but dead and credits George W. Bush for it's death.

If 2008 turns out to be a pivotal election, defining a new political era, it is important to give credit where credit is due. Two key reasons for the change will be the crackup of the coalition of the dominant party of the era, the Republicans, and the almost complete political failure of George W. Bush and his chief political adviser, Karl Rove. Let me begin with the second reason, and then move to the first.

The Bush/Rove strategy of accentuating divisions along partisan lines was a bold gamble that ultimately failed, because it depended on the Bush presidency being successful. Think of it this way: If Bush does well at his task, then people at the margins gravitate toward the winning side and the Republican coalition slowly expands over time, rejuvenating the party and producing a post-Reagan vision (organized, for example, around the War on Terror and the opportunity society) that extends well into the future. But if Bush does badly, or as it turned out, very badly, the same strategy that encourages increased partisanship and divisiveness will tend to make Americans believe that these features of political life are also the cause of political failure. They will seek both change and a sense of unity. This is precisely what Obama has tapped into, which is why he has been successful so far. Obama, if you will, is what Bush's strategy has produced.

Now I think that the coalition was bound to unravel anyway but the failure of George W. Bush may have sped it up. The Reagan Revolution itself was responsible. The social conservatives could only be expected to vote against their own economic interests for so long. For that reason I think Huckabee may deserve more of the credit than Bush. As I explained the other day:

People are not voting for Huckabee because he's a likable guy they are voting for him because they are scared. Not of the Islamo terrorists but they are afraid of losing their jobs, their house and their medical insurance.

[.....]

They don't trust the leaders in government or the leaders in business to look out for them. And we are not just talking about the working poor - there are families with six figure incomes that have the same fears.

Still Clueless After All These Years

We have the first instalment of Bloody Bill Kristol in the New York Times and yes he's still the same clueless Bill that said this:

"There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."
~Willaim Kristol, April 4th, 2003

The subject of his first column isn't wars for oil and Israel but Mike Huckabee. Now I never thought that Huckabee had a chance at the nomination but Kristol seems to be saying he thinks Huckabee might. Since Kristol is always wrong I guess I was right. He talks about why Huckabee is popular but since he never talks to anyone that isn't a multi-millionaire he gets it completely wrong.

After the last two elections, featuring the well-born George Bush and Al Gore and John Kerry, Americans — even Republicans! — are ready for a likable regular guy. Huckabee seems to be that. He came up from modest origins. He served as governor of Arkansas for more than a decade. He fought a successful battle against being overweight. These may not be utterly compelling qualifications for the presidency. I’m certainly not ready to sign up.

Still, as the conservative writer Michelle Malkin put it, “For the work-hard-to-get-ahead strivers who represent the heart and soul of the G.O.P., there are obvious, powerful points of identification.” And they speak to younger voters who are not yet committed to the G.O.P. In Iowa, Huckabee did something like what Obama did on the Democratic side, albeit on a smaller scale. He drew new voters to the caucuses. And he defeated Mitt Romney by almost two to one, and John McCain by better than four to one, among voters under 45.

Now it’s true that many conservatives have serious doubts about Huckabee’s positions, especially on foreign policy, and his record, particularly on taxes. The conservative establishment is strikingly hostile to Huckabee — for both good and bad reasons. But voters seem to be enjoying making up their own minds this year. And Huckabee is a talented politician.

His campaigning in New Hampshire has been impressive. At a Friday night event at New England College in Henniker, he played bass with a local rock band, Mama Kicks. One secular New Hampshire Republican’s reaction: “Gee, he’s not some kind of crazy Christian. He’s an ordinary American.”

Now I'm glad I have Kristol to make fun of now because I have had trouble making fun of David Brooks lately, he may actually get it. People are not voting for Huckabee because he's a likable guy they are voting for him because they are scared. Not of the Islamo terrorists but they are afraid of losing their jobs, their house and their medical insurance. They are not socialists but as Brooks pointed out the other day they are conservatives but:

A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.

They don't trust the leaders in government or the leaders in business to look out for them. And we are not just talking about the working poor - there are families with six figure incomes that have the same fears. But to be fair Bloody Bill is not alone. Most of the DC punditry never talks to anyone who isn't a multi-millionaire and are just as clueless as Bill.

Does David Brooks Get It?

When I saw the title of David Brooks' Friday column, The Two Earthquakes, I assumed it was simply more of the gasbag bloviating we have come to expect. It appeared in my local paper on Saturday and I read it. The first earthquake he discusses is Obama's win in Iowa and for the most part it fulfilled my initial expectations. But then he moves on to Huckabee's win. Now there was a hint that Brooks might have some idea of what was happening in the Republican party in his commentary on Mitt Romney but his insight on the Huckabee win amazed me.

On the Republican side, my message is: Be not afraid. Some people are going to tell you that Mike Huckabee’s victory last night in Iowa represents a triumph for the creationist crusaders. Wrong.

Huckabee won because he tapped into realities that other Republicans have been slow to recognize. First, evangelicals have changed.

That's right, after being taken for a ride by the wealthy GOP elite they have their own candidate he in addition to talking about social issues is also talking about their economic realities. The "great economy" the Republicans try to spin has simply left a majority of Americans behind and that includes the vast majority of evangelicals.

Second, Huckabee understands much better than Mitt Romney that we have a crisis of authority in this country. People have lost faith in their leaders’ ability to respond to problems. While Romney embodies the leadership class, Huckabee went after it. He criticized Wall Street and K Street. Most importantly, he sensed that conservatives do not believe their own movement is well led. He took on Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush. The old guard threw everything they had at him, and their diminished power is now exposed.

As I said here:

The Republicans have been forced to attack Huckabee but run the risk of driving off the Religious Right in the process. Even if the Religious Right does not field it's own presidential candidate this important part of the Republican base may just stay home.

But this is what leads me to believe that Brooks either gets it or is very close:

Third, Huckabee understands how middle-class anxiety is really lived. Democrats talk about wages. But real middle-class families have more to fear economically from divorce than from a free trade pact. A person’s lifetime prospects will be threatened more by single parenting than by outsourcing. Huckabee understands that economic well-being is fused with social and moral well-being, and he talks about the inter-relationship in a way no other candidate has.

In that sense, Huckabee’s victory is not a step into the past. It opens up the way for a new coalition.

A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.

I don't think the above applies only to evangelicals but to a majority of Americans which is why the Republican party is heading down the Road to Nowhere. Americans see their political leaders as greedy and corrupt, they see their business leaders as greedy and corrupt and they see themselves as victims of the greed and corruption. Enter a good old boy Huckabee, and perhaps to some extent even Obama, and you have an apple cart that is about ready to be overturned.

Biting the hand that empowers you

The Republicans are in between a rock and a hard place. The Republicans came to power because of the social conservatives. They are now experiencing the blow back in the form of Mike Huckabee. To stop the Huckster they have to insult the very base that empowered them and that's just what they are doing. It started before Iowa with Rich Lowry's pathetic rants at the National Review, here and here. Well post Iowa it has gotten really nasty. For example Steven Green at the Vodka Pundit:

I’ll put this in language even your tiny little Iowa brains can understand: What the f*** is wrong with you people?

[....]

All my love, you corn-sucking idiots,

Even the normally rational Rick Moran got in on the action.

Does any of this matter to the superstitious nincompoops in other states who are salivating to vote for this guy?

I understand Rick's frustration as a fellow atheist but Rick my friend it's not my base - I don't need these "nincompoops" but your party does if it ever wants to win another election.

DC Gasbags

Mike Huckabee took the over inflated out of touch DC gasbags by surprise. Glenn Greenwald writes:

I love when this happens. It's a reminder that the political prattle that spews forth from group-think media stars without end and which consumes our political dialogue for a full year is based on absolutely nothing. Also, most predictive "analysis" from the media stars' cousins, the cogs in the right-wing noise machine, is merely self-absorbed wishful thinking masquerading as objective knowledge:

He then gives us some examples. The always brilliant Digby writes:

The Republican establishment obviously has no idea what to do about him. He's a creature of the monster they created when they empowered the "low information" rural evangelical base. I suspect they will try to get to the preachers and turn them against him, but they can't afford to go after him too hard or too obviously or they will suffer hugely in the down ticket races in the fall if the evangelicals stay home. And the alternative who seems to be emerging is John McCain, someone who is loathed by the same evangelicals. It's a problem.

As I have said here before Huckabee is the Republican's worst nightmare and one they created. Digby observes:

What we are seeing is the three wings of the conservative movement fighting for supremacy: Romney from the money wing, McCain (or Rudy) from the hawk wing and Huck from the God wing. The first two are part of the political establishment and rely on it for guidance. Up until now, the God wing did too. But now they have one of their own and they really don't need the permission of the money boyz or the hawks to vote for him. And they sure don't care what the pointy headed TV gasbags think about it.

Huckabee won big last night with no money and no organization. Maybe he can't replicate it anywhere else. But I think he might. The religious right is the biggest single voting bloc in the GOP --- the people they cultivated and trained to vote en masse for the Republicans. They have a very specific agenda of social issues that they care about and understand very well. They are true believers. And they are the only constituency in the party who actually likes their candidate and feels inspired by him. He's one of them. I think he can win it and win it in spite of the many unforced errors he's bound to make. His followers just don't care about stuff like that. Unless he suddenly goes soft on abortion or gay rights or one of their other signature issues, he's got them.

The Republicans created a monster that may end up consuming them. I keep coming back to this quote:

Unfortunately, some wars are won by the side that is the most fanatical in the religious sense. The victorious leaders harness the holy energy of collective insanity.

~COGITOR KWYNA

[From the Machine Crusade by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson]

That "collective insanity" will eventually get you.

A Christian Nation???

Over the last few years we have seen the theocons attempt to rewrite the constitution and the words of the founding fathers to demonstrate that the United States is a "Christian Nation". One of the most outrageous claims is that out legal system is based on the Ten Commandments. The latest to do this is the none too bright Mike Huckabee:

"The Ten Commandments form the basis of most of our laws and therefore, you know if you look through them does anybody find anything there that would be all that objectionable? I don't think most people would if they actually read them," he said.

Ed Brayton explains how this is utter nonsense. As it turns out commandants one through four are blatantly unconstitutional. Only two of the commandments, Thou shalt not kill and Thou shalt not steal, are actually part of our legal system and they are found in all legal systems in the world. The remaining four are simply not part of the legal system. Go read Brayton's post for the details.

Running Scared

Yes that's the name of Jazz's old blog. Jazz was a Republican at the time and he was running from what his party had become. Today it's the people Jazz was running from who are Running Scared. I have already discussed their sudden intolerance of "too much" religion as Mike Huckabee is suddenly a front runner. Now their target is Huckabee's lack of foreign policy experience. Of course neither Rudy or Mitt have any either but at least they are saying the right words. Huckabee isn't.
The Perils of Huckaplomacy

More problematic for his presidential prospects, when Huckabee did speak clearly he often sounded more
like Dennis Kucinich than Dick Cheney, something Republican primary voters are not likely to find appealing.

The Bush administration is guilty of a "bunker mentality," said Huckabee. The war in Iraq has "distracted" the administration from pursuing al Qaeda. Although Iran wanted better relations with the United States, he averred, "when President Bush included Iran in the axis of evil, everything went downhill pretty fast." And according to Huckabee, it was not Saddam Hussein but "the U.S. occupation" that "destroyed Iraq politically, economically, and socially." (Huckabee's remarks won praise as "nuanced and comprehensive" from the host of the event, a senior adviser on Bill Clinton's National Security Council.)

In the 11 weeks since that speech, Huckabee has made several other statements about foreign policy in a Huckabee administration. He favors a comprehensive ban on the use of harsh interrogation techniques to extract information from terrorists, and he has urged the Bush administration to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay. And as the writers at the Powerline blog have pointed out, Huckabee seems to believe the best foreign policy is one guided by the Golden Rule--"you treat others the way you'd like to be treated"--and mutual respect, "showing the kind of respect that other nations would want and deserve."

Now all of this of course blaspheme to the corporate elite and neocon wings of the Republican party. As Kevin Drum points out:

But then along comes Huckabee, and guess what? He's the real deal. Not a guy like George Bush or Ronald Reagan, who talks a soothing game to the snake handlers but then turns around and spends his actual political capital on tax cuts, foreign wars, and deregulating big corporations. Huckabee, it turns out, isn't just giving lip service to evangelicals, he actually believes all that stuff. Among other things, he believes in creationism (really believes), once proposed that AIDS patients should be quarantined, appears to share the traditional evangelical view that Mormonism is a cult, and says (in public!) that homosexuality is sinful. And that's without seeing the text of any of his old sermons, which he (probably wisely) refuses to let the press lay eyes on.

I think this brand of yahooism puts off mainstream urban conservatives every bit as much as it does mainstream urban liberals. They're afraid that this time, it's not just a line of patter to keep the yokels in line.

The party needed the "yokels" to win and tolerated the nonsense as long as it didn't threaten to actually go anywhere. But now one of the Republican's front runners actually believes this stuff. He is also familiar with what Jesus actually said and thinks it might be a good idea to apply it to foreign policy. That makes him almost sound like one of those dreaded "liberals". Yes the Republican party elites are Running Scared.

Update

Digby has some thoughts worth reading

Karl Rove's Frankenstein - Part II

A few days ago I discussed poor Rich Lowry's sudden realization the the crazy bible thumpers of the Religious Right had taken over the Republican party. I said at the time:

This was oh so predictable. Karl Rove marshaled the 16th century masses to vote against their own best interests in order to stop a woman's right to choose, an individuals right to die with dignity and to enforce selected portions of Leviticus. They all but took over the party. Well they are once again being ignored by the party's movers and shakers and they don't like it. Well guess what? They have their own guy in the race, Mike Huckabee, and they don't see any reason to support the anti Leviticus, Rudy, or the cultist, Mitt. A Frankenstein monster indeed.

Well poor Rich is at it again.
Huckacide
A shiny Christmas present for the Democrats

The GOP’s social conservatism inarguably has been an enormous benefit to the party throughout the past 30 years, winning over conservative Democrats and lower-income voters who otherwise might not find the Republican limited-government message appealing. That said, nominating a Southern Baptist pastor running on his religiosity would be rather overdoing it. Social conservatism has to be part of the Republican message, but it can’t be the message in its entirety.

Someone needs to tell Huckabee. His first TV ads in Iowa touted him as a “Christian leader,” and his target audience of evangelicals has responded. But according to a Pew poll released in early December, only 1 in 7 nonevangelical Republicans support him in Iowa and 1 in 20 nonevangelicals in New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Huckabee has declared that he doesn’t believe in evolution. Even if there are many people in America who agree with him, his position would play into the image of Republicans as the anti-science party. This would tend to push away independents and upper-income Republicans. In short, Huckabee would take a strength of the GOP and, through overplaying it, make it a weakness.

I have to wonder how the Religious Right feels about suddenly becoming "a weakness". The Republican Party could not have won an election without the Social Conservatives. Over the last seven years they took control and did any number of nutty things that offended the majority of Americans making them a liability. John Cole reminds us that Lowry and his magazine were cheerleaders for much of that 16th century insanity.

Where the hell has Lowry been the last decade? Let’s review this GOP’s greatest hits:

Terri Schiavo
Marriage Amendments
Stem Cell Bans
Doctoring Scientific reports
Evolution Denial
Global Warming denial
Just Us Sunday
Abstinence Only
Faith-based initiatives
Election year anti-gay ballot initiatives

And so on and so on. The GOP is, quite simply, little more than freakish display of social conservatism. And you can go through the NRO archives and see what they had to say about every one of those issues and others (protip- they were supportive). Rather than trying to run from his creation, Lowry should embrace it- he and his cohort had a good hand in making the GOP what it is today. Enjoy, and quit pretending to be surprised when the villagers race to destroy your monster with pitchforks and torches.

To quote the Bible:

As you sow so shall you reap

~Galatians VI

Andrew Sullivan has some thoughts.

It's amazing to me to watch Rich Lowry and Charles Krauthammer begin to panic at the signs of Christianism taking over the Republican party. Where, one wonders, have they been for the past decade? They have long pooh-poohed those of us who have been warning about this for a long time, while cozying up to Christianists for cynical or instrumental reasons. But now they want to draw the line. Alas, it's too late, I think, for Charles to urge an openness toward atheism or non-religion in a party remade on explicitly religious grounds by Bush and Rove. Who was it, after all, who cited Jesus Christ as the most influential "philosopher" in his life as part of his electoral strategy? Who reorganized his party to base it on churches? The man whom Krauthammer eagerly supported in two consecutive elections.

And he concludes with this:

This, to me, is the critical distinction between a Christianist and a mere Christian. One wants to infuse politics with religion; the other wants to respect both, separately, and to keep religion private. I should add I do not want to banish the word "God" from the public square. But I do want that invocation to be as thin and as empty and as formal as the Founders intended. The current Republican party has reinvented itself as a force on opposite grounds. The party of Huckabee and Romney, the party of Hewitt and Dobson, the party of Ponnuru and Neuhaus is emphatically not a secular party.

And that is why part of me, I confess, wants Huckabee to win. So he can lose. So the GOP can lose - as spectacularly and humiliatingly as possible. If we are to rid conservatism of this theocratic cancer, we need to start over. Maybe it has to get worse before it can get better. But it is certainly too late for fellow-traveling Christianists like Lowry and Krauthammer to start whining now. This is their party. And they asked for every last bit of it.

The Road To Nowhere

Mitt Romney has spent a lot of money to fuel his campaign down the road to nowhere. As you can see in the latest RCP poll average he is in fifth. The general consensus is that after his "Faith In America" address he is still on the same road only going faster. I have discussed this ad nauseum already but there is some good analysis out there tonight you might want to check out.

• Lee Harris explains How and Why Romney Bombed

  The Mormon church is not Romney's problem; it is Romney's own personal religiosity. On the one hand, Romney is too religious for those who don't like religion in public life—a fact that alienates him from those who could care less about a candidate's religion, so long as the candidate doesn't much care about it himself. On the other hand, Romney offends precisely those Christian evangelicals who agree with him most on the importance of religion in our civic life, many of whom would be his natural supporters if only he was a "real" Christian like them, and not a Mormon instead.
  
  
  To say that someone is not a real Christian sounds rather insulting, like saying that he is not a good person. But when conservative Christians make this point about Romney, they are talking theology, not morality. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Mormon creed will understand at once why Romney felt little desire to debate its theological niceties with his target audience of Christian evangelicals, many of whom are inclined to see Mormonism not as a bona fide religion, but as a cult. In my state of Georgia, for example, there are Southern Baptist congregations that raise thousands of dollars to send missionaries to convert the Mormons to Christianity.

• In Romney's Terrible Speech Matthew Yglesias explains the theology.

  It's hard to see this as anything other than an effort to trick people; the Mormon emphasis on Gethsemane rather than the crucifiction is not a trivial theological difference, nor is the fact that Mormons believe in "another," more important, Testament of Jesus Christ in addition to the Christian Bible. I don't personally have a stake in that quarrel but I paid enough attention in Bible class at Grace Church School to know that this isn't some nothing to be papered over.
  
  Now if Romney had wanted to say that the nature of his beliefs about Jesus are irrelevant to the campaign, fine. Similarly, if he'd actually wanted to avoid discussing Mormon theology, fine. But he didn't stick to it. Instead, what he wanted to do was discuss just enough about Mormon theology to make it seem as similar as possible to orthodox Christianity while underscoring the idea that the nature of his belief in Christ is relevant to the campaign just insofar as his beliefs overlap with those of the Evangelical Protestants whose votes he's courting.
  
  All of this meshes with Romney's disgusting efforts to unite all people of faith under the banner of excluding atheists entirely from his account of virtue. And this, in turn, combines with his ludicrous "say something nice about everyone" paragraph:....

• And this brings us to an all important question: How is it playing in Iowa?. Not too well apparently.

  Not great.
  
  At least not in the most powerful paper in the state, The Des Moines Register.
  
  The arrival of snow here in the heartland as well as the Omaha tragedy has diminished some of the coverage, but The Speech still got considerable attention yesterday and today.
  
  It was above the fold, in the top right corner (the traditional lead story position) of yesterday's paper.
  
  "Romney takes risk with talk on faith," read the headline above David Lightman's syndicated story. The piece included significant skepticism about the political impact of Romney's speech. But worse for Mitt's camp, it included this key right under the story ended on page one: "Learn more about Mormonism" (yes, it was in bold).
  
  On the back of the front section was a list of bullet points under "Beliefs of the Mormon Church." Naturally, included were all the key differences between the LDS church and mainline Christianity.

Romney's real problem is Romney. He knows he needs the Evangelical Christian vote and as a result has done a recent 180 on every issue that's important to them. They noticed! And now this speech where he attempts to explain his faith without explaining it and once again it's a NO SALE. He was preaching tolerance to least tolerant group of people in the country. And they don't need him - they have Mike Huckabee.

Karl Rove's Frankenstein

This is an interesting little post by The National Review's Rich Lowry:
Revenge of the Evangelicals

Remember how evangelicals had "matured"? Remember how the war on terror had replaced social issues? It shouldn't be hard, since all those things were being said a couple of weeks ago (heck, still being said maybe even a few days ago). Part of what seems to be going on with the Huckabee surge is evangelicals sticking their thumbs in the eyes of the chattering class—we're still here, we still matter, and we still care about our signature issues. Remember the lack of excitement in the Republican race, especially among dispirited social conservatives? Well, now there is some excitement, and it isn't over free market economics or the war on terror, but a candidate who doesn't speak compellingly about either of those things but instead about social issues. As a friend I was talking to a little earlier points out, the most important moment of the campaign so far came when a social conservative excited a social conservative audience—Huckabee with his "I come from you" speech at the "values summit." This friend argues that the Huck surge makes it harder, not easier, for Rudy to win the nomination. Now that many evangelicals have a horse in this race, it would be very hard to tell them that not only will their guy not get the nomination, but they'll have to settle for a pro-choicer. I don't know about that, but Huck has certainly trashed about nine months-worth of conventional wisdom on the changing nature of social conservative voters.

This was oh so predictable. Karl Rove marshaled the 16th century masses to vote against their own best interests in order to stop a woman's right to choose, an individual's right to die with dignity and to enforce selected portions of Leviticus. They all but took over the party. Well they are once again being ignored by the party's movers and shakers and they don't like it. Well guess what? They have their own guy in the race, Mike Huckabee, and they don't see any reason to support the anti Leviticus, Rudy, or the cultist, Mitt. A Frankenstein monster indeed.

Feudal Economics and the Republican Party

I meant to comment on this opinion piece by Jonah Goldberg yesterday:
Ron Paul isn't that scary
It's important because it tells us what the Republican Party is all about and what it fears the most. Goldberg attacks social conservative Mike Huckabee because he is an economic progressive.

What's troubling about The Man From Hope 2.0 is what he represents. Huckabee represents compassionate conservatism on steroids. A devout social conservative on issues such as abortion, school prayer, homosexuality and evolution, Huckabee is a populist on economics, a fad-follower on the environment and an all-around do-gooder who believes that the biblical obligation to do "good works" extends to using government -- and your tax dollars -- to bring us closer to the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

[....]

And therein lies the chief difference between Paul and Huckabee. One is a culturally conservative libertarian. The other is a right-wing progressive.

Yes, the Republican Party stands for feudal economics - to them the "ownership society" is where less than 5 percent of the population owns 95 percent of everything. Where owning a house for most means you are an indentured servant until you make that last payment if ever you do. What they hate the most is the New Deal and what they fear the most is a new New Deal just when it looked like they were turning things around. That's why many in big business support Hillary and fear John Edwards. That's why Libertarian Ron Paul does not frighten the Jonah Goldbergs as much as a "right-wing progressive" like Huckabee. Paul my cut down the war machine but he won't use the federal government to help the serfs.