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Huckabee: Carrying on the Republican Tradition?
Posted by KTK

George W. Bush has demolished all Presidential records for stupidity, vapidity, contempt for facts, and sheer lack of intellectual engagement with the world. He has also scaled new heights in preening religious posturing, religious sectarianism, and scarily delusional religious triumphalism in an official capacity. It’s hard not to think those two phenomena are related (as they are overtly in such specific instances as Bush’s denial of global warming, embrace of creationism, opposition to stem cell research and abortion, and the like).

Mike Huckabee is giving Bush a run for the title on the religious front, claiming his religion “defines” both him himself and his approach to his official duties, touting his status as an ordained minister as part of his qualifications for the Presidency, declaring categorically that no Muslim would be appointed to his Cabinet [that was Romney; my apologies], and boasting (falsely) in a Republican candidates’ debate that he holds a degree in theology. (He does not, but it’s striking that he would bring it up as part of his qualification for office.)

This is bad enough, but it’s also becoming apparent that Huckabee is somewhat strikingly . . . um . . . fact-challenged, too.

Huckabee is reasonably articulate, and seems far from meeting Bush’s standard for stupidity (so few do). Even so, he doesn’t really seem to be the brightest guy around, his vaunted “sense of humor” notwithstanding.* But what’s really noticeable is that he simply doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about a lot of the time - and not only when people surprise him with pesky questions about little things like nuclear policy reports that have been in the news for days, as if a presidential candidate would be expected to know about such trivia, but even in the case of comments he himself makes on issues he brings up on his own initiative. He keeps saying things that are simply wrong, and demonstrating a remarkable ignorance of things he would either be expected to know about, or is required to know about to act as President.

It begins with his startling statement that he had not only not read, but had not even heard of, the NIE report that demolished the Bush administration’s drum-beating for an attack on Iran - after the report had been top of the news for two days. He compounded that by claiming that he hadn’t had time to read it because it had been released only four hours before he was asked about it (it had been released the previous day), and that it wasn’t fair to criticize him because George Bush had “had it for four years” and still didn’t know what was in it (Bush had had it for one year, and Huckabee hardly helps himself by adopting George Bush as his standard of ignorance). All of this was less than a week before a major Republican TV debate - Huckabee simply wasn’t paying attention to the leading issues of the day, even when he must have known he’d be asked about them.

But many of his many gaffes have that same quality of bewilderment. He has repeatedly misstated the sequence of events regarding his own active participation in the Dumond pardon. He appeared to be genuinely uninformed when he questioned whether Mormons regarded Jesus and Satan as brothers - then backed off when criticized for this implication, although in fact there are Mormon Church publications that make exactly that statement. (It’s not just that he was courting religious bigotry, but that he really didn’t seem to know the score on an issue he himself brought up. He stumbles both coming and going, first speaking from ignorance and then claiming ignorance as his excuse when in fact he was right. And this from someone who constantly broadcasts his religious expertise as a qualification.) He defended his anti-choice position by invoking the signers of the Declaration of Independence, “those 56 brave people, most of whom, by the way, were clergymen”; at most five had ever been preachers, only one was an active minister at the time of the Convention. (Again he calls attention to his own status as a Baptist minister, and again - on his own ground of greatest expertise - he screws it up.) He claimed in another debate to have had the “most impressive” record on education among the candidates, although his state ranks almost at the bottom of the country by most measures, and Romney’s state of Massachussetts is #1. He also claimed in a televised debate that “I’m stronger [regarding terrorism] than most people because I truly understand the nature of the war that we are in with Islamofascism. . . . It’s a theocratic war. And I don’t know if anybody fully understands that. I’m the only guy on that stage with a theology degree”; he had previously made the same claim in numerous campaign appearances. But he doesn’t have a theology degree - an admission his campaign was forced to make after Huckabee himself had raised the issue as proof of his own competence. (Bizarrely, Joe Carter, his oppo research director, tried to spin this as a positive, offering it as the reason for Huckabee’s ignorance about Mormon beliefs. But it was Huckabee’s own claim about the degree that prompted attention to the issue.)

And all this is just the dumb stuff that comes out of his mouth. It doesn’t even touch on the chosen ignorance that he has deliberately embraced, such as creationism and other anti-science positions dictated by religious beliefs, or his simply loony policy positions, apparently resulting from his failure to do even the most basic number-crunching, such as his policy that all 12 million illegal aliens in the US would leave the country within 120 days and then apply for readmission from across the border, or his scheme to abolish the income tax and institute a sales tax with monthly rebate checks to every single family in the country based upon nothing but their number of children (a policy he reportedly adopted after reading one nutso book and not talking to anyone else about it).

In short, Huckabee, who uniformly gets high marks for being personable and articulate, sounds like an idiot when you ask him to talk about anything in a serious way, or to make factual statements about important matters that are in fact true and relevant. He even sounds confused about the factual grounding for his own beliefs. (If it somehow matters to his abortion position that “most” of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were clergy, shouldn’t he change his position on being informed that over 98% of them were in fact not?) He can’t even make a clear and correct factual statement about himself. And invariably these false statements trend in one of two directions: to inflate Huckabee’s own credentials, or to put a falsely positive light on some aspect of his relgious beliefs. In other circles, these would be called . . . lies . . . but in Huckabee’s case it’s possible to believe he really is that confused.

Huckabee is often compared to Ronald Reagan as a “communicator” (meaning they both speak in folksy platitudes and plainly don’t know shit about anything). The comparison is worrisomely close. Reagan was mendacious, mean, and stupid, and had a habit of saying ridiculous nonsense to his own benefit (welfare queens, Soviet treaty-breaking, and his own disgusting, and repeated, claim to have personally liberated Nazi concentration camps, among many, many other examples). His staff had a standard practice of issuing printed lists of “corrections” to the false statements he made after any press conference. The thing about Reagan was, he was so dim that it seemed clear at least some of his confusion was real. Much of the time he was obviously lying, and was never called on it, but much of the time he just didn’t know what he was saying, and people seemed to think it was funny. Huckabee seems to be much in the same mold: he doesn’t, or maybe can’t, tell the truth, in part because he has a decidedly mendacious streak but in part because he simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about most of the time and doesn’t seem to know that he doesn’t know. As with Reagan, Huckabee seems perfectly content to make things up, say whatever comes into his head, and act shocked when anyone calls him to account on it.

The longstanding Republican addiction to ignorance is wearing thin. Surely, after Reagan, Bush/Quayle, and George W. Bush, three generations of imbeciles is enough.

* Huckabee’s alleged sense of humor: “I may not be the expert that some people are on foreign policy, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night.” So far, no one to my knowledge has managed to explain what that even means.

UPDATE: I left out the one that sparked this post! Huckabee, criticized for his lack of depth on foreign policy (see NIE, above), just published an article in the highly serious policy journal Foreign Affairs. Seeking to burnish his credentials as a profound global thinker, he worked in a quote from the classic Chinese military strategy primer, The Art of War by Sun Tzu: “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” The quote is actually from Michael Corleone in The Godfather II. Sheesh.

UPDATE: Fixed typos, spelling-os, and one embarrassing counterfactual Huckabee-o.

December 16th, 2007 General, Politics, Church & State, Religion, Culture, Education, Media, News & Current Events | 21 comments