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Blogs Eric Reads
The 2012 Republican Primary
President-Elect Obama hasn’t been sowrn in yet, but the 2012 Republican presidential primary has already begun in earnest.
First up, here come Bobby and Huck:
Here we go again: Huckabee, Jindal visit
Starting next week, two high-profile Republicans will visit Iowa amid speculation that they will seek the GOP 2012 presidential nomination.
Up first is this year’s GOP Iowa caucus winner, Mike Huckabee. The former Arkansas governor will host two book-signing events Nov. 20 - one in Cedar Rapids and the other in Windsor Heights.
On Nov. 22, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal will visit Cedar Rapids and West Des Moines to speak at several events. Jindal is known for having played a significant role in Louisiana’s recovery from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
And Ambinder speculates that Newt Gingrich is heading to Iowa as well.
Meanwhile, Charlie Crist is touting Florida’s divided government:
Crist calls Florida a model for future of GOP
TALLAHASSEE — Barely a week after Barack Obama’s decisive victory, Republican governors across the country gather in Miami today for two days of exploring how to find their way out of the wilderness.
The host of the Republican Governors’ Association event is Florida’s Charlie Crist, a big believer in the “big tent” theory who calls his way of governing “a model for the country.”
And of course, we can’t count Sarah Palin out.
Rehasing ‘08 and Rehearsing, Perhaps for ‘12
Unleashed and not humbled, Ms. Palin is on a speed date with history, upending protocol as she goes. She put herself on full display, in interviews with NBC and Fox News before Mr. McCain had a chance to take a no-victory lap on “The Tonight Show.” And she has many more appearances scheduled throughout the week, including a star turn at the Republican Governors Association meeting in Miami on Thursday.
…
When Mr. Lauer asked her if she minded not being allowed to give more interviews during the campaign, Ms. Palin said she would not delve into that kind of “inside baseball,” and then she stole a base. “I would have loved more opportunities to speak to the American people about what I’d like to see of — happen there with our country,” she said pointedly.
Here’s to hoping the already fractured GOP starts a highly divisive four-year primary. That should end any of this “center-right country” nonsense.
Update: Haha! CNN puts the kibosh on Sarah Palin 2012:
Four years ago, John Edwards was in much the same situation Palin finds herself in right now. Edwards was John Kerry’s running mate on the losing ticket in 2004, and officially launched his presidential bid in this campaign in December of 2006 — only to come in second in the Iowa caucuses this January, followed by a third place finish the following week in the New Hampshire primary. The former North Carolina senator withdrew from the race for the White House on January 30.
Go back another four years and it’s a similar story. Sen. Joe Lieberman was Al Gore’s running mate on the losing ticket in 2000. Lieberman launched his own bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, but dropped out on February 3 of that year after losing six straight primaries.
Vice President Dan Quayle and his boss, President George H.W. Bush, went down to defeat in the 1992 election. Quayle raised money and considered runs in 1996 and 2000, though he ultimately never ran in any primaries or caucuses.
Vice President Walter Mondale and his boss, President Jimmy Carter, lost the 1980 election. Mondale ran for the White House in 1984, winning the Democratic presidential nomination, before losing the general election in a landslide to President Ronald Reagan.
Sen. Bob Dole was the vice presidential nominee on the losing Republican ticket in 1976. Dole briefly ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, which Ronald Reagan won, and made a more serious effort in 1988, before losing to Vice President George H.W. Bush. Dole eventually won the GOP nomination in 1996, before losing the general election to President Bill Clinton.
If that’s not enough, both 1972 Democratic vice presidential nominee Sargent Shriver and 1968 VP nominee Ed Muskie ran for the top spot in their party four years later. Each lost their nomination battle.
Palin’s Future
A little bit of Saturday morning fun because they’re already polling Republicans for 2012:
Fortunately for her, she’s got a pretty sold lead on “Other” and “Don’t Know.”
Someone Tell Huckabee that Torture Isn’t Funny
Republicans have made some pretty ridiculous comments about waterboarding. Attorney General Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence McConnell have both said that waterboarding would be torture if it were done to them. Mukasey also won’t say whether waterboarding is illegal and wouldn’t prosecute anyone who did it even if it was. Missouri’s own Sen. Kit Bond compared waterboarding to swimming lessons, and right-wing war hawk Bill Kristol is “ambivalent on torture.” Today, though, presidential candidate Mike Huckabee takes the cake:
This morning, CNN ran a story “tracking the strain furious campaigning puts on the human body” for the presidential candidates. During the segment, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee joked that his campaign schedule is not providing enough time to sleep and that, for him, is “like being waterboarded”:
HUCKABEE: I’m finding just out how long I can go sleep deprived. You know, running for office is sort of like being waterboarded, I think.
Our soldiers agree that waterboarding is torture, but Mike the Huckster thinks it’s a joke? This man, this so-called “Christian,” wants to be the President of the United States and the leader of the free world, and he thinks that torture is something to laugh about? Truly sickening.
Huckabee Wants God in the Constitution
Holy Fuck.
Mike Huckabee’s newest bit of fundamentalist craziness goes way beyond a simple marriage amendment (although he still supports that). Last year–as in two weeks ago in December–the Huckster claimed that he would respect the core American value of religious freedom.
“The key issue of real faith is that it never can be forced on someone,” Huckabee said. “And never would I want to use the government institutions to impose mine or anybody else’s faith or to restrict.”
That makes perfect sense since, you know, that’s how the First Amendment works. Of course, that was then. Check out Huckabee’s New Year’s resolution.
I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do is amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than trying to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.
I guess in Huckabee’s mind there’s only one Founding Father–with a Founding Son and a Founding Holy Ghost.
The truly scary thing is that this is just the tip of the iceberg of Mike Huckabee’s Islamofas… er, religious extremism. PERRspectives has the Top 10 Moments and Ten More Moments of Mike Huckabee’s extremism, if you aren’t already scared.
Watch the Gospel of Mike below.
Huckabee Responds to Bhutto: Beware Scary Brown People
Mike Huckabee issued his response today to Benazir Bhutto’s assassination: watch out for scary brown people.
“We ought to have an immediate, very clear monitoring of our borders and particularly to make sure if there’s any unusal [sic] activity of Pakistanis coming into the country. We just need to be very, very thorough in looking at every aspect of our own security internally because, again, we live in a very, very dangerous time,” Huckabee said during a news conference Thursday night in West Des Moines.
Something about the phrasing of that first sentence keeps bugging me. It almost reads as if “Pakistanis coming into the country” is the unusual activity that we need to be worried about. Well, I guess he wouldn’t be a Republican without the fearmongering.
John McCain, on the other hand, has been using Bhutto’s death to play up his own foreign policy credentials. What does the Huckster have to say about that?
“This is not a time for us to play political games with (Bhutto’s death). It’s a time to express our outrage as well as our sadness and sympathy for the people of Pakistan and for the rest of the world,” Huckabee told reporters.
So let me get this straight: we shouldn’t be playing political games with someone’s death… unless the game is immigration and Mike Huckabee is the one playing. Wow. I guess he wouldn’t be a Republican without the hypocrisy either.
Romney: Huckabee = Clinton?
In a desperate attempt to save his skin in Iowa, Mitt Romney has launched a new campaign comparing Mike Huckabee with fellow Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.
“Governor Huckabee’s record is more liberal than our nation needs right now,” the former Massachusetts governor said in Iowa last week, seeking to link his GOP presidential rival to the former Democratic president who is loathed by many Republican loyalists.
…
Romney’s aides argue Huckabee’s record as governor undercuts his claim that he’s the only authentic conservative in the race. Romney himself has stopped short of explicitly saying his rival is simply another Clinton, though he’s less shy about it in campaign literature mailed to thousands of Iowa Republicans.
So let me get this straight: Mike Huckabee–a Southern Baptist minister who is firmly anti-choice, opposes embryonic stem cell research, and really, really hates the gays–is just like Bill Clinton? I don’t get it.
“They’re very different people, and obviously the area of concern relates to spending and taxation. We think of Bill Clinton as being a tax raiser and a spender,” Romney said — then mused that he had read somewhere that Huckabee had raised more taxes than Clinton when they were governors.
Ah, of course, it’s all about taxes. Mike Huckabee is just like Bill Clinton because Huckabee rose taxes, according to… something that Mitt Romney read… somewhere.
C’mon, Mitt, you’re going to have to do a little better than that, especially when your record on some of those issues… well, who knows what your record is?
Huckabee: AIDS is a Gay Disease
It should come as a surprise to no one that former nobody and now serious presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is no friend of homosexuals. He is a Southern Baptist minister and his ridiculous anti-gay rhetoric is a huge turn-on for the fundamentalist right-wing. We also know that Huckabee is a lover of rapists, so long as the rape victim is related to Bill Clinton. Today’s Mike Huckabee news, though, defies all rational comprehension.
Mike Huckabee once advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public, opposed increased federal funding in the search for a cure and said homosexuality could “pose a dangerous public health risk.”
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“If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague,” Huckabee wrote.“It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents.”
Yes, the best way to deal with AIDS is to just lock up anyone who has it. And by “anyone who has it,” of course, we mean homosexuals. That is, after all, what they get for choosing to be gay.
Huckabee wrote this in 1992 while running for U.S. Senate, so it is possible that he just didn’t know the facts about AIDS. There was a time when people actually thought that you could get HIV just by breathing the same air as someone with AIDS. Can’t hold him responsible for something he couldn’t have known, now can we?
When Huckabee wrote his answers in 1992, it was common knowledge that AIDS could not be spread by casual contact.
Oh… Well. Never mind then. If Huckabee knew the ways that AIDS could be transmitted, why didn’t he suggest a permanent quarantine of all known drug users? Or doctors and nurses, who handle needles and blood on a regular basis? He could have closed the nation’s blood banks and banned transfusions–there’s lots of infected blood there. I heard in my sixth grade health class that nicotine is a “gateway drug” to stronger drugs like heroine. Maybe Mike Huckabee should lock up all smokers. Who knows how long it will be until they start sharing needles? No, Huckabee was more interested in his vendetta against those “dangerous” homosexuals.
Now, don’t be mistaken and think that Mike Huckabee is a cold, heartless bastard. Remember, he did want to continue the search for a cure:
When asked about AIDS research in 1992, Huckabee complained that AIDS research received an unfair share of federal dollars when compared to cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
“In light of the extraordinary funds already being given for AIDS research, it does not seem that additional federal spending can be justified,” Huckabee wrote. “An alternative would be to request that multimillionaire celebrities, such as Elizabeth Taylor (,) Madonna and others who are pushing for more AIDS funding be encouraged to give out of their own personal treasuries increased amounts for AIDS research.”
So after all that time Mike Huckabee spends reminding us of the dangers of gays… er, I mean, AIDS, he doesn’t think that the taxpayers should be footing the bill for trying to cure it. It’s not like the federal government has any obligation to respond to “a dangerous public health risk.” And if those queer-lovers in Hollywood think that AIDS is should be cured, then they can fund AIDS research themselves.
It’s inconceivable that a serious presidential candidate can have these views about a deadly disease. Of course, that was the old Mike Huckabee. The new Mike Huckabee says:
“My administration will be the first to have an overarching strategy for dealing with HIV and AIDS here in the United States, with a partnership between the public and private sectors that will provide necessary financing and a realistic path toward our goals,” Huckabee said in a statement posted on his campaign Web site last month.
Oh, so now that we know that AIDS affects heterosexuals too, it’s okay for the federal government to fund research to cure it? Now that we know it’s not really a “plague” designed to cleanse the earth of the homosexual scourge but a real, serious killer syndrome?
Forgive me, Governor Huckabee, if I have some trouble taking you at your word.