Xenophobes, your table is ready
There's a lot to like about Mike Huckabee -- his folksy eloquence, his humor and a number of his more thoughtful positions. He won't get my vote for President, should he run again, because he also reminds me that we must never elect a cleric to that high office.
All the same, he's always struck me as a refreshingly different kind of politician -- until yesterday, that is.
Earlier this week Huckabee asserted that Pres. Barack Obama was raised in Kenya, later claiming that he "misspoke." I believe he's way too smart for that, but I gave him a pass anyway. Continuing to backpedal on talk radio yesterday, however, he said,
"...I do think [Pres. Obama] has a different world view, and I think it's in part molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to boy scout meetings, and you know, our communities were filled with rotary clubs, not madrassas."Like I said, Huckabee's a smart guy. It's laughable to argue that he dropped the M-bomb innocently -- without a doubt, he invoked it to fan right-wingers' reflexive fear of all things different. (Read: all things not Christian, all things foreign, especially all things Muslim).
See, Mike Huckabee wants us to know that Pres. Obama spent part of his childhood in another country (Indonesia, not Kenya), in another culture -- therefore he's un-American and unfit to lead. But by appealing to irrational fear, Huckabee exposes his own unfitness.
He'll have a lot of xenophobic company on the 2012 campaign trail, of course, and fearmongering is bound to draw predictably mindless crowds, but I can't imagine any thinking person buying his brand of unfiltered bullshit.
(By the way, it's worth clarifying the makeup of Huckabee's broadcast audience yesterday. He was speaking on American Family Radio -- not Family Radio Worldwide, which is run by über-fearmonger Harold Camping, the doddering nutjob who preaches that the world will end on May 21, 2011. I realize that I may be highlighting a distinction without a difference, but there it is.)
I must've missed civics class that day
Rick Santorum, the former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, wants to be the next President of the United States -- maybe. Recently liberated from a FauxNews contract which prohibited him from appearing on competing networks, on Wednesday he did an interview with CNN's John King.
King asked Santorum if he subscribes to some conservatives' call to table (temporarily) social issues like abortion rights and gay marriage, in order to devote more attention to righting our national economy. From Santorum's response:
"...America is a moral enterprise. I mean, we are a people who believe in certain things and want to see a society in a certain way. We have common shared values. And those values are morally based."A moral enterprise? Funny, I was taught that the United States of America is a representative republic with democratic moving parts.
Santorum is a Roman Catholic hammer. If he doesn't make every single issue look like some kind of moral nail, he loses his gimmick -- along with his base and any shot he might have at the Oval Office.
When he speaks of we, of certain things...in a certain way, he doesn't speak for me. He equates, arrogantly and incorrectly, Catholic doctrine with American morality [sic]. And by doing so, he's taken a swan dive off of the list of presidential candidates I might consider.
Truth? Or consequences?
Felipe Calderón, President of Mexico, came a-calling at the White House yesterday. During a press conference that followed the high-level meeting, a Mexican reporter asked the U.S. president if (essentially) he'd be willing to use his veto power to block laws upholding the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
I swear I'm not making that up. Pres. Obama answered, in part,
First, let's give our president credit for hitting the right rhetorical notes in those first two paragraphs: stand by the Second Amendment, enforce existing laws. That said, to my ears it almost sounded like if he weren't the President, he wouldn't be bound by the Constitution and might take a different position."Well, the Second Amendment in this country is part of our Constitution and the President of the United States is bound by our Constitution. So I believe in the Second Amendment. It does provide for Americans the right to bear arms for their protection, for their safety, for hunting, for a wide range of uses. That does not mean that we cannot constrain gunrunners from shipping guns into Mexico. And so we believe that we can shape an enforcement strategy that slows the flow of guns into Mexico, while at the same time preserving our Constitution."
"Part of that job is to enforce the laws that are already on the books more effectively. Part of it may be to provide additional tools to law enforcement so that we can prevent the shipment of these weapons across the border.
"But I do want to emphasize -- and I emphasized this privately with President Calderón -- we are very mindful that the battle President Calderón is fighting inside of Mexico is not just his battle; it’s also ours. We have to take responsibility just as he’s taking responsibility. And that’s true with respect to guns flowing from north to south; it’s true about cash flowing north to south."
I remain wary (to say the least) of his stated commitment to an individual American citizen's right to keep and bear arms. Never mind his words -- his record doesn't inspire confidence.
As for the U.S. taking responsibility for murderous Mexican narcotics cartels, well, that's where I get off the presidential train to Tijuana. The history of U.S.-Mexico cooperation [sic] is indisputably one-sided -- we give, they take. We export taxpayers' money and they squander it. While the American economy sputters and stalls, the Mexican government shamelessly begs for more aid -- and gets it.
It's not isolationism to take an unapologetically aggressive approach to securing our borders, to spend more of our dwindling resources on bolstering our own nation. And even if it is, I'm proudly isolationist.
