I never thought that it would be possible for a Republican to come close to the cynicism and hypocrisy regularly displayed by those on the left side of the aisle. Think Harry Reid's political decision to surrender to four al Qaeda suicide bombers in April.
But former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has just proved me wrong. The Huckster has descended to the bottom of the political basement and is, as we speak, digging furiously.
Huckabee's campaign drafted a series of ads attacking Mitt Romney, portraying Romney as being a flip-flopper on several critical issues. Fair enough.
But then Huckabee holds a press conference, playing the ads for the media even as he announces that he is going to take the high road and not release the ads. Thus, Huckabees ads get exposure through the national media while Huckabee simultaneously claims credit for taking the ethical and moral highground. This from the Washington Post:
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee gathered scores of reporters in a room to unveil an attack ad against rival Mitt Romney, then suddenly changed course and renounced the ad he had produced -- but not before playing it for the dozens of television cameras.
Huckabee said the ad -- which attacks Romney for being too dishonest to be president -- was sent to television and radio stations yesterday but will not be broadcast. He said he had made the decision 10 minutes before his news conference, surprising even his top staff. "I pulled the ad. I do not want it to be run at all," he said. The surprise move prompted incredulous questions from the journalists, who pressed Huckabee on whether he was trying to attack Romney in the press while at the same time getting credit for running a positive campaign. Huckabee called that a cynical view of what he described as a heartfelt decision to take the high road. . .
Read the entire article here. There is nothing cynical about questioning Huckabee's actions on this one. There is no other possible way to explain Huckabee's actions. If Huckabee had a true change of heart on this, he simply would have pulled the ads - no news conference, and under no circumstance playing the ads for the news media. Huckabee is playing us for idiots. His is an act of cynicism and hypocrisy that encapsulates the worst of American politics. Bottom line, anyone who votes for this deeply unprincipled man is making a tragic mistake.
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The WSJ is reporting that Ron Paul might win the New Hampshire primary. This leads to the inescapable conclusion that the primary system is broken. New Hampshire is not representative of Republicans generally nor sanity apparently.
"Asked for his views on an alternative to the EU, Alan Sked, the founder of UKIP, famously noted that the alternative to suicide was simply not to commit suicide." Brits horrified at their country’s goose step march into that grand experiment in undemocratic socialism, the EU, are looking at an "anglosphere" alternative. Sounds about right to me.
And speaking of Britain, the country which gave us the model for our Second Amendment right of an individual to keep and bear arms with its Declaration of Rights of 1689 (which to my knowledge Britain has never repealed) does not even trust its constabulary to be armed. A female police officer was shot while investigating an armed robbery this morning in Lancashire and one of her assailants escaped.
And the Tories are as bad as the socialist Labour Party in the UK. They are still not making an unequivocal statement that they will allow the people of the UK a referendum on Treaty of Lisbon that establishes the EU as a state and Britain as a province. Labour’s Gordon Brown is refusing to allow a referendum. The Tory’s David Cameron is trying to hint that he will if elected without promising it. What a travesty.
Expected on January 1 in the binge drinking capital of the world - a lot of partying. Expected post January 1, a record number of abortions and STD’s.
"The Roman Catholic Church has vowed to "fight the Devil head-on" by training hundreds of priests as exorcists. Father Gabriele Amorth, 82, the Vatican's Exorcist in Chief, announced the initiative amid the Church's concerns about growing worldwide interest in Satanism and the occult."
Watch German multiculturalism in action. "A top member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives has said Germany has too many criminal young foreigners and that immigrants must stick to the rules of Germany's "Christian-Occidental" culture . . ." Both seem reasonable. But not to Der Speigel and the rest of Germany’s left.
Iran’s greatest fear appears to be from internal dissent. That is not surprising. The IRGC is addressing this by taking better control of the theocracy’s thugs, the Basij, and expanding the force.
Fatah’s armed wing calls for the assassination of Fatah’s Prime Minister Salaam Fayad for "collaboration" with Israel and the US. Someone remind me why we are giving a dollar in aid to Fatah? It certainly has brought no stability.
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This is likely to be rare. My choices for first and second place in both the Council and Non-Council categories won both first and second place.
In the Council categorty, first place went to a very thoughful post from the Bookworm Room, Judeo-Christian Doctrine and Moral Freedom. Second place saw a tie between Soccer Dad, whose post First Let the Lawyers Kill Us All tells the sordid tale of lawyers and war in Israel, and Done With Mirrors, whose post on Ron Paul examined the Republican candidate's take on U.S. history.
In the Non-Council category, first place went to a very insightful post, Fear by Silver Bullets. It won running away. Second place went to Laughter and Tears by Eternity Road.
See the full results here.
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Walid Phares assesses the state of terrorism around the world. "In short, there are several "wars" on terror worldwide. . . . America is leading the widest campaign, but efforts around the globe are still dispersed, uncoordinated, and in many cases, contradictive."
At NRO, a symposium on Pakistan with a wide variety of views on Bhutto’s assassination and how we should interact with Pakistan, including this assessment from Victor David Hanson: "Pakistan is a nuclear dictatorship, with a thin Westernized elite sitting atop a vast medieval Islamist badlands that it cannot control."
Bhutto’s 19 y.o. son is expected to be named the successor as head of her political party. If he actually wins in the Pakistani election, this seems like it will lead to the sort of "palace intrigue" not seen since the days of Cardinal Richelieu.
More reflections on fallout from the Bhutto assassination here. And the Telegraph has an incisive article on the Frankenstein’s monster of terrorism nurtured by successive Pakistani governments, including Bhutto’s, that now threatens to overtake all of Pakistan. Former PM Sharif, an Islamist with Saudi support, is not what we want to see in charge of Pakistan. For some good background, see this Stephen Cohen article on the jihadi threat in Pakistan. And this from Tariq Ali on the Saudi connection to the madrassahs and terrorists in Pakistan.
Michael Ledeen examines more State Department pro-Iranian spin.
2007 was "a year that strode boldly into the stall of human events and took a wide stance astride the porcelain bowl of history." Read David Barry’s hilarious
year in review.
A politically incorrect Aussie’s
wish list for 2008.
Classical Values has some thoughts on our rather
insane primary system that gives special weight to Iowa and New Hampshire.
A New Years Resolution for Congressional Republicans that all conservatives can get behind.
End the earmarks.
And some late blogging of things I did not have time to get to earlier . . .
Hillary Clinton almost
takes the cake for sublime idiocy. The last thing Pakistan needs at this point is further destabilization, but we have Hillary calling the current government illegitimate and demanding an international tribunal to investigate Bhutto’s assassination. While Obama does take the cake – finding that Bhutto’s assassination was caused by our prosecution of the Iraq war. If only we had surrendered earlier to al Qaeda, perhaps this would not have happened. Even the
incredibly cynical John Edwards called that one a bit of idiocy.
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An interview with an Iraqi Shiite cleric and politician who calls for secular rule, religious opposition to the Iranian concept of theocratic rule, and who says that "President Bush and America should be thanked for saving us from . . . Saddam Hussein. . ."
In Iraq, a series of raids target the Mahdi Army and, in a separate action, the capture of two men suspected of involvement in the May 12 kidnapping of three American soldiers during an insurgent attack against their checkpoint 12 miles south of Baghdad.
A sharp rise in inflation has provoked fierce criticism of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—not only from his reformist opponents, but also from senior conservatives who helped bring him to power but now say he is mismanaging the economy.
The story of Naomi Wolf and the incredible sophistry of our modern left.
EU propaganda - in reality, its what the EU does most effectively.
Iran expanded their terrorist activities in Iraq after the 2006 elections in America, but they have been beaten back by a combination of effective U.S. military action and an Iraq that does not buy into the Iranian theocratic model, despite the surge of mullah money and weapons into Iraq. The assertion the reduction in violence in Iraq is due in part to a conscious decision of the mad mullahs in Iran is counterfactual according to Michael Ledeen.
Der Spiegel has a timeline of "the most important political events and violent attacks in Pakistan since March 2007."
The Bhutto assassination, seen in light of the assassinations in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East, is an example of how radical Islamist, both Wahhabi / Salafi and Khomeinist Shia, register their vote in elections.
An analysis of Bhutto’s legacy and the ramifications of her assassination from the Jerusalem Post.
From Wafa Sultan: "The Quran states: ‘Allah hath purchased of the believers their persons and their goods, for theirs (in return) is the Garden (of Paradise ): They fight in His Cause, and slay and are slain" (9/111).’ I believe that Muslim clerics in the US have explained this verse in the same way that the clerics in Syria had explained it to me at young age. Growing up, I had always believed that suicide bombing was justified for the cause of being a martyr."
The UK resorts to bribing criminals to self deport themselves in an attempt to deal with a glut of foreign criminals that cannot be deported under the EU’s insane immigration and deportation laws.
How utterly screwed are British multiculturalists: . . . Amis recently put to his impeccably liberal audience at the ICA: 'Do you feel morally superior to the Taliban?' Only about a third raised a hand to say they did, a nice demonstration of relativist liberal guilt.
And there is this gem from the multiculturalists in Germany: "Many of us in the West are convinced that our presence in Afghanistan cannot be justified, that our troops should withdraw and that Afghanistan should be left to the Afghans. They ask themselves: Who are we to believe that it is inhumane to sell an 11-year-old girl? Who are we to impose our values so vehemently on the Afghans, on this [40 year old] man . . . [who purchased] this girl [and married her]?"
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I never thought that it would be possible for a Republican to come close to the cynicism and hypocrisy regularly displayed by those on the left side of the aisle. Think Harry Reid's political decision to surrender to four al Qaeda suicide bombers in April.
