Allow me to share my final opinion of Mike Huckabee. This man has been and continues to be the worst aspect of the 2008 Republican race. Not only is he unfit to be President by virtue of his inexperience, but he has troubling tendencies towards big government. Just because he touts the Fair Tax doesn't mean he'd be able to enact it!
He may have taken on the Clinton machine in Arkansas, but how would he deal with the Putin machine, or the Ahmahdinejad machine? Considerably higher stakes, and I don't trust the man's experience.
Now here's my real problem with him: He has consistently impeded the progress of men who are better qualified to win this race, to the benefit of one John McCain.
First, Huckabee snatched up evangelicals and social conservatives ahead of Fred Thompson, whose conservative credentials are quite solid. He effectively tripped up that horse right out of the starting gate and Thompson never recovered. This was his first offense.
And now, his newest offense is that he will not drop out of the race. The only thing he is doing is benefiting John McCain at the expense of Mitt Romney...the better candidate.
John McCain is, for all his "straight talk," willing to break with conservative principles and has had a little trouble suppressing his scorn for the conservative base of the Republican Party. He is a Washington bigwig and isn't shy about telling people. His partnerships with Kennedy and Feingold on legislation that is almost directly contrary to conservative principles are immensely important in our judgment of the man...and why he should not be President.
So, thanks Mike Huckabee. Thanks for your folksy down home nonsense that has effectively handed the Republican nomination to John McCain. Thanks for disrupting not one, but two of the more viable campaigns. And thanks for ruining my opinion of Chuck Norris. You were funny, Mike, and likable, but you should have stayed in Arkansas.
Damn your eyes, sir. Step aside now.
Hi all. I'm going to take a break from politics and current events to tell you all about my wife's new website. She calls it Bytes and Bobbins, and it is going to highlight her art and craft activities. She's a graphic designer by trade, but has a whole lot of talent when it comes to sewing, decorating, cooking and ceramics. She's actually been published in the book "500 Pitchers" for a lovely little pumpkin thing. She's got her own style and really enjoys what she does. In fact, sometimes I have to remind her to eat.
So if you have an interest in crafts, give her a look (and some site hits!) and some feedback. Feel free to link to it if you belong to a craft group.
Well, with Fred Thompson gone it's time for me to pick a new candidate. I've chosen Mitt Romney for his economic experience, his stated commitment to pursuing our foreign interests, his executive credentials and because he's just so gosh-darn presidential looking.
I believe his conversion on the pro-life issue is genuine and I am willing to give this man my support. Of the remaining Republican candidates he offers the best hope of winning in November. You can go to his site, here, and explore the issues.
Of course, I am certainly up for a discussion on his relative merits. I will need practice defending/promoting him, so let's get started, Vox friends.
You may fire when ready.
Abortion is one of those things that I feel is a defining struggle for our time. Strong feelings exist on both sides of the debate, but for me it all comes down to the simple principle that no person should be denied the right to draw their first breath.
Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness...is their order an accident? I think not. Happiness can only be pursued in an atmosphere of liberty (from government, from tyranny, from discrimination). Liberty cannot be said to exist unless all are given equal rights under the law, and the foremost of these is the right to life.
Piddling questions of when life begins are irrelevant. Should we not err on the side of caution when dealing with such great matters as the life of a potential being? A being that if left to develop will only die from disease, defect or man's intervention. When weighed against the limitless potential of a human life these three instances are trifling obstacles. Always err on the side of life.
So, to those of you who do read this stuff I put up here, do you recall my post from a few days ago? The one about Fred Thompson, in which I reasoned that if the Presidency is beyond his reach then he might at least be considered for the VP spot? The better to shore up the conservative credentials of the eventual nominee, you see.
Well, I just saw on Fox News that the pundits have caught up with your boy Scio. The ticker made mention of my very idea, not 10 minutes ago.
Which begs the question...Am I simply becoming more experienced in the way of politics, or do I have a secret readership?
Come out, Chris Wallace! I know you're there.
Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. What's your strongest memory or impression of King's contributions?
The disillusionment I felt when I learned that King the man was not King the news footage.
Most people aren't really their public image, of course. I myself am a big phony most of the time. But King was in all my textbooks growing up, and was practically sainted. It was one of those things you took for granted. Questions about his academic achievements and his personal character were all whitewashed over by the good folks at Houghton Mifflin. He has been named a saint by some notable mainline Protestant denominations...which is especially painful to consider.
In the years since his death the man has been lauded for his advocacy of civil rights, his image untarnished. I suppose this is alright. But a fair appraisal of his legacy must include the documented personal vices and failings inherent to him. The man had the capacity to be unethical, and evidence indicates he also had the tendency.
Is criticism of King's ethics tantamount to casting aspersions on the whole process of the Civil Rights Movement? I contend it is not.
Does the man deserve a federal holiday? I think that he does not. Had I my druthers, I would keep the holiday, but rename it "Civil Rights Day" or some other appropriate title to commemorate his work.
Dispense with the cult of personality and focus on the issues--that will be the measure of the man's impact.
1. If Thompson places third tonight in South Carolina, he will drop out of the race.
2. If Thompson places second, he may stay in for a little while.
3. If Thompson stays in and continues his campaign as he has, he will remain a factor in the race but is unlikely to make serious waves.
4. If Thompson stays in and continues his rhetoric from the past few days, of which it has been asked, "Where was this six months ago," then there is a very good chance that he can oust Huckabee.
5. If Thompson ousts Huckabee, I see him as Romney's Vice President. This would shore up Romney's conservative credentials and Thompson could draw McCain supporters to the ticket.
At present, nobody is willing to make the call. It appears McCain will take the state, with Huckabee in second. But Thompson may surprise by breaking out of third and upsetting Huckabee...fingers crossed.
UPDATE: Not a chance. Thompson polled 16%, with Huckabee taking 30% and McCain 33%. How depressing.
UPDATE 1/22: Thompson has officially withdrawn from the race. My predictions which followed from the first are therefore unverifiable and since the first came true, I have a 100% accuracy rating thus far.
I defy anyone to argue with Mark Steyn. The man is simply a genius. He makes me depressed by exposing how utterly screwed up the West's collective head is. Is it any wonder that an Islamic group in Canada was trying to have him muzzled?
At some point conservatives will have to abandon the polite tolerance we've had for liberal inanities and fulfill their expectations by calling out the militia and rounding them up, Planet of the Apes style. Har Har, of course I'm joking. Or am I? I've been accused of worse while arguing about less important things.
What's at issue here is that the absurdity of this generation's anti-war stance is without bounds. Steyn drags it out into the light and clubs it like a baby seal.
UnphenomenalTimes
Fake but ... fake.By Mark Steyn
Have you been in an airport recently, and maybe seen a gaggle of America’s heroes returning from Iraq? And you’ve probably thought, “Ah, what a marvelous sight. Remind me to straighten up the old ‘Support Our Troops’ fridge magnet, which seems to have slipped down below the reminder to reschedule my acupuncturist. Maybe I should go over and thank them for their service.”
No, no, no, under no account approach them. Instead, try to avoid making eye contact and back away slowly toward the sign for the parking garage. You’re in the presence of mentally damaged violent killers who could snap at any moment.
You hadn’t heard that? Well, it’s in the New York Times: “a series of articles” — that’s right, a whole series — “about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home.” It’s an epidemic, folks. As the Times put it: “Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: ‘Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.’ Pierre, S.D.: ‘Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.’ Colorado Springs: ‘Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.’”
Obviously, as America’s “newspaper of record,” the Times would resent any suggestion that it’s anti-military. I’m sure if you were one of these crazed military stalker whackjobs following the reporters home you’d find their cars sporting the patriotic bumper sticker “We Support Our Troops, Even After They’ve Been Convicted.” As usual, the Times stories are written in the fey more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone that’s a shoo-in come Pulitzer time: “Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.”
“Patchwork picture,” “quiet phenomenon”… Yes, yes, but exactly how quiet is the phenomenon? How patchy is the picture?” The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan either “committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one.” The “committed a killing” formulation includes car accidents.
Thus, with declining deaths in theater, the media narrative evolves. Old story: “America’s soldiers are being cut down by violent irrational insurgents we can never hope to understand.” New story: “Americans are being cut down by violent irrational soldiers we can never hope to understand.” In the quagmire of these veterans’ minds, every leafy Connecticut subdivision is Fallujah and every Dunkin’ Donuts clerk an Abu Musab al-Zarqawi with an annoyingly perky manner.
It was the work of minutes for the Powerline website’s John Hinderaker to discover that the “quiet phenomenon” is entirely unphenomenal: It didn’t seem to occur to the Times to check whether the murder rate among recent veterans is higher than that of the general population of young men. It’s not. Au contraire, the columnist Ralph Peters calculated that Iraq and Afghanistan vets are about a fifth as likely to murder you as the average 18-34 year-old American male. Better yet, the blogger Iowahawk meticulously drew his own “patchwork picture” of another “quiet phenomenon”: the Denver newspaper columnist arrested for stalking, the Cincinnati TV reporter facing child-molestation charges, the Philadelphia anchorwoman who went on a violent drunken rampage. As Iowahawk’s one-man investigative unit wondered: “Unrelated incidents, or mounting evidence that America’s newsrooms have become a breeding ground for murderous, drunk, gun-wielding child molesters?”
Why would the Times run such a series? My columnar confrere Clifford May connected it to a notorious anniversary: Seventy-five years ago, in February 1933, the Oxford Union passed a famous resolution, by an overwhelming margin, that “this House would under no circumstances fight for its King and country.” The Union was the world’s most famous debating society, in a great university of the dominant global power; its presidents have gone on to serve as Prime Ministers at home and overseas, from Gladstone in the 19th century all the way to Benazir Bhutto in the 1990s.
So the debate and its resolution sent a message to Britain’s enemies: As Churchill saw it, the vote was a “disgusting symptom” of the enervation of the ruling elites. Clifford May sees that same syndrome today around the western world, but, in fact, it’s worse than that.
The Oxford debate took place a decade and a half after the worst carnage in human history. The First World War cost the lives of some 20 million people. Do you remember back in 2004 when Ted Koppel devoted one episode of Nightline to reading out the names of everyone killed in combat in Iraq? If he’d attempted a similar task with the British Empire’s war dead in 1919, the half-hour episode of Nightline would have had to be extended to ten months — or longer if Ted took bathroom breaks, or indeed pauses for breath. The war reached into the smallest English hamlet and culled a generation of young men. It swept through the glittering palaces, too: The brother of Queen Elizabeth (the mother of the present queen) was killed on the western front in 1915. It would be a statistical improbability to have been at that Oxford Union debate and have come from a home in which on some mantle or bureau there was not a photograph of a son or uncle or fiancé forever young.It would be as if millions upon millions had been slaughtered in the first Gulf war, and 15 years later Harvard or Yale were debating whether we should do it all over again.
In other words, we don’t have their excuse. Our war has one of the lowest fatality rates of any war ever, and, when they get so low that even Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid temporarily give up the quagmire bleating, the Times invents bogus stories to suggest that the few veterans lucky enough to make it out of Iraq alive are ticking timebombs ready to explode across every Main Street in the land.
A few days before the Times series began, The National Journal published the latest debunking of a notorious survey: in 2006, the medical journal The Lancet reported that the Iraq war had killed over 650,000 civilians, over 90 percent victims of the US military. That’s 500 civilians a day. Which is quite a smell test. The figure was over ten times the estimates even of hardcore antiwar left-wing groups. Who are these 500 daily victims? Why aren’t there mass riots by Iraqi civilians protesting the daily bloodbath?
Because it’s fake. It didn’t happen.
Yet it’s indestructible. I picked up a local paper in New Hampshire the other day, and a lady psychotherapist was twittering about our “mentally wounded” troops returning home after killing gazillions and bazillions of Iraqi civilians. In 1933, the debaters at Oxford were horrified by the real cost of war. In 2008, the editors of the Times, our college professors and Hollywood celebrities, are horrified by a fiction. Faced with an historically low cost of war, they retreat into fantasy. Who’s really suffering from mental trauma? Who needs the psychotherapy here?
How do you usually react when people start talking politics?
My ears perk up and I immediately begin trying to guess how they vote. It's not hard these days. I'll try to maintain a neutral tone and get them to reveal as much as they can about their views. Sometimes I don't even share my own.
To be honest, I'm usually the one who brings it up. Most of the people in my life don't have time to consider politics. That includes me, but I still manage.
I am the one who sainted Reagan, days ago...VDH has only become more intelligent by imitating me.
This is a great message for the GOP candidates. While Reagan was a great leader, this is not Reagan's America. This is 2008, not 1980. Republicans must show that they can emulate Reagan instead of ape him. The principles are constant, but the particulars are by necessity different.
St. Reagan
Idealizing ideological purity.By Victor Davis Hanson
Ronald Reagan’s presidency was a great success. He rebuilt a chaotic U.S. military and helped end the Cold War. Reagan’s radical tax cuts in 1981 spurred economic growth and redefined the relationship between U.S. citizens and their government. And he appointed conservative federal judges and bureaucrats who tried to roll back the half-century trend of expanded governmental control over our lives.
Reagan’s nice-guy charm made it difficult for even his critics to stay angry with him for long. But he was no mere smiling dunce, as liberal intellectuals used to snicker. His private papers and diaries instead reveal that he was widely informed, read voraciously, drew on a powerful intellect and was an effective writer.
It is no wonder that conservative leaders — especially the current crop of Republican presidential hopefuls — now constantly evoke Ronald Reagan’s successful presidency. In contrast, they rarely hearken back to the uprightness of the one-term Gerald Ford, or praise the foreign-policy accomplishments of the two Bush Republican presidencies.Instead, the candidates try to “out-Reagan” each other by claiming they alone are the true Reaganites while their rivals in the primaries are too liberal, flip-floppers, or without consistent conservative principles.
In short, Ronald Reagan has been beatified into some sort of saint, as if he were above the petty lapses and contradictions of today’s candidates. The result is that conservatives are losing sight of Reagan the man while placing unrealistic requirements of perfection on his would-be successors.
They have forgotten that Reagan — facing spiraling deficits, sinking poll ratings and a hostile Congress — reluctantly signed legislation raising payroll, income, and gasoline taxes, some of them among the largest in our history. He promised to limit government and eliminate the Departments of Education and Energy. Instead, when faced with congressional and popular opposition, he relented and even grew government by adding a secretary of veteran affairs to the Cabinet.
Two of his Supreme Court appointments, Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, were far more liberal than George W. Bush’s selections, the diehard constructionists, John Roberts and Samuel Alito.
Reagan’s 1986 comprehensive immigration bill turned out to be the most liberal amnesty for illegal aliens in our nation’s history, and set the stage for the present problem of 12 million aliens here unlawfully.
Republicans forget all this — but so do Democrats, who for their own reasons want to perpetuate an unflattering myth of Ronald Reagan as an extremist right-wing reactionary.
In foreign affairs, Reagan was not always sober and judicious. He shocked Cold Warriors by advocating complete nuclear disarmament at his Reykjavik summit with Michel Gorbachev.
In the middle of Lebanon’s civil war, he first put American troops into a crossfire. Then, when 241 marines were blown up, he withdrew them. That about-face, and the failure to retaliate in serious fashion, helped to embolden Hezbollah’s anti-American terrorism for decades.
The Iran-Contra scandal exploded when a few rogue administration officials sold state-of-the-art missiles under the table to Iran’s terrorist-sponsoring theocracy, and prompted opposition talk of impeachment.
In other words, a great president like Ronald Reagan made mistakes. He sometimes reversed positions, played politics, and baffled his conservative base — some of the very charges now leveled against Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thompson.
When a candidate today says, “Reagan would have done this or that,” he apparently has a poor memory of what Reagan — the often lonely, flesh-and-blood conservative in the 1980s — was forced to do to get elected, govern, and be re-elected. While in office, he proved more often the pragmatic leader than the purist knight slaying ideological dragons on the campaign trail.
So what is the real Reagan legacy? It is mostly the Great Communicator’s uncanny ability to distill complex problems, offer a more conservative solution than America was used to or ready for, and then inspire and enact difficult change through a brilliant “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” turn of phrase.
But 2008 is a different world from a quarter-century ago, when Reagan began his presidency. Amnesiac candidates need to separate the myth of Reagan — the perfect conservative — from the real man when stridently chastising their rivals for their past fudging on taxes, illegal immigration or the size of government.
The current pack of five serious Republican candidates should call on the spirit and principled inspiration of Ronald Reagan for guidance about new problems in the way they evoke Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt.
But these candidates only do his memory — and their own careers — a disservice by claiming sainthood for Ronald Reagan, and thereby demanding a standard of immaculate conservative conduct that neither Reagan nor they could ever attain.
--Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author, most recently, of A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.
(C) 2008 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
