Presidential Candidates: Huckabee is an unqualified Woo

First of all, what is a “Woo”? Basically, it is someone who believes in something irrational (e. g., ghosts, spirits, dousing, esp, etc.) As far as I am concerned this applies to people who believe in standard nonsense such as burning bushes, parting seas, Jewish Zombies, flaming chariots, celestial virgins, magic decoder glasses for golden plates, etc.

And, as far as I am concerned, a candidate who believes in supernatural divine intervention (creationism, a changing of physics on our behalf) is a “woo” and is therefore unqualified to lead our nation.

Using religion as a way of centering or as a way of finding the right thing to do, or to even ease back pain (yoga) is ok.

As a review, check out the following:

Answer: Obama says that religion can help with values thereby making responses more effective. Richardson says that faith is personal. Biden gives the best answer (“no amount of prayer can stop a hurricane”), and Clinton skillfully avoids turning off the woos. Edwards gives a good answer too (help him with his own personal life, but can’t miraculously cure disease.

Now, to the candidates:

Bill Richardson: I love his resume and think that he is doing a good job as governor. But his future would be more as a possible Senator.

John Edwards: solid liberal credentials, but I wonder how much he is benefiting from not being in the Senate at this time and shouting advice from “the peanut gallery”. He remains a player who asks the tough questions.

Barack Obama My top choice, but he is going through the growing pains of being a national candidate. We’ve recently discussed this. At long last, he is going after Hillary Clinton. I see that as a good thing; politics is NOT a “no contact sport”.

Hillary Clinton By far the best campaigner, and knows how to find common ground with others. No, I find her too conservative for my tastes. But I see it this way: I might agree more with Dennis Kucinich than any other candidates. But in the case of Rep. Kucinich, if I agree with him on 20 issues, I’ll probably get satisfactory action on NONE of them from him. I might agree with Hillary Clinton on, say, 10 issues, but am likely to get action on, say, 4-5 of them. Therefore, even from my point of view, I am better off with Clinton.

John McCain. I don’t agree with him on most issues, but I do trust him to put the interests of the country above those of his party. Yes, he supports the war, but wants it “done right”; that is, he would ask for sacrifices on the part of the country (which I’d agree with). If forced at gunpoint to vote for a Republican, he is the one I’d pick.

Mitt Romney On one hand, he did a good job as governor of Massachusetts. On the other hand, he’s gone away from his stands, presumably because he “had a change of heart’. Needless to say, I am skeptical. I see him as a slick “insurance salesman” from the Bourbon wing of the party. I do trust his administrative skills though.

Rudy Giuliani I agree with many of is social views, but he strikes me as a unrepentant war-monger who has 9-11 to offer and little else. He would be something like a smarter “wise guy” version of George W. Bush. No thanks.

Mike Huckabee Believe it or not, his candidacy has some cross over appeal; in fact I’ve seen some blog posts written by liberals who praise this guy (here and here)

Yes, I admire the fact that he is not a hateful Republican and that he appears to genuinely respect people. But the fact is that he is an unabashed woo; he openly believes in real, physical, divine intervention.

This clown is not qualified, period.
Think about it: how much better are our lives now-a-days (in terms of diseases that we can cure, child mortality, etc.) and WHY our lives are better: our science is better! Had we settled for a “god did it” answer, our life spans would still be in the 40’s and we’d still have child mortality rates near 50%.

Fred Thompson I once thought that he was too dumb and lazy to be a good president. But there are a couple of other views out there:
His laziness might lead to his not doing as much harm as he might otherwise do:

The New York Times dinged him for a campaign visit to Florida that featured “no more than three campaign stops a day.” The Times deemed this “a relatively leisurely schedule.”

Only three events a day? Unenthused about the butter princess? Someone stop this man from getting near nuclear weapons! At least, that’s the curious implication when people talk about Fred Thompson: that Thompson’s laziness makes him unsuited to be president. It’s an image that threatens to ruin his campaign before it has a chance. “Saturday Night Live” has turned him into a joke (“I’m not sayin’ I don’t want to be your president, because I kinda do”) and influential conservatives doubt his mettle. Thompson “has no passion, no zeal, and no apparent ‘want-to,’” Focus on the Family founder James Dobson said recently.

But this is deeply unfair. Not the notion that Thompson is lazy; he clearly is. (The quotation he chose for his high school senior portrait reads, “The lazier a man is, the more he plans to do tomorrow.”) What’s unfair is the idea that laziness disqualifies him from the presidency. In a society that has grown to fetishize work, laziness has gotten a bad rap. Moreover, a little laziness may be just what we want from our next president. [...]

But who says fanatical drive is essential in a great leader? Winston Churchill frequently stayed in bed until 11 a.m., worked in his pajamas, and enjoyed long afternoon siestas. (Some doctors argue that taking mid-afternoon naps–a practice guaranteed to draw instant mockery from friends and coworkers– leads to better work performance.) Nor is hard work necessarily a virtue. Take our most industrious recent presidents. Richard Nixon worked diligently– frequently in the name of persecuting his enemies–while Jimmy Carter moistened his brow laboring over such matters as scheduling for the White House tennis court and precision hostage rescues.

The gold standard for presidential laziness was surely set by Ronald Reagan. According to his biographer, Lou Cannon, Reagan often didn’t start his days until 9:30 a.m., finished them shortly after 5 p.m., and usually took Wednesday and Friday afternoons off. When Reagan once complained during his 1980 campaign that his schedule began too early, Cannon writes, an adviser told him to get used to it, because, once in the White House, Reagan would have a national security aide arriving at 7:30 every morning to brief him. “Well,” Reagan replied, “he’s going to have a helluva long wait.” Cannon concludes that Reagan “may have been the one president in the history of the republic who saw his election as a chance to get some rest.” You may not admire Reagan’s record. But the primary voters Thompson is wooing certainly do, making the Gipper’s example an ideal comeback next time someone calls Fred lazy.

Doesn’t George W. Bush–with his inseparable feather pillow and long hours with espn–prove the perils of laziness? Not at all. As his recent biographer, Robert Draper, told me, Bush may be inattentive to detail, but he is not in fact lazy. To the contrary, Bush is a fitness freak, a punctuality obsessive, and an early riser. [...]

Bush’s problem isn’t that he shunned work, but rather that he took it on without being prepared. Starting a war, after all, is not the act of a lazy man. It involves far more long meetings and complicated speeches than simply letting a troublesome problem fester. If Fred Thompson is as lazy as reputed (and if he’s anything like me), he’d have stuck a Post-it note to his wall back in 2002 reading saddam? and then never quite gotten around to invading. Which, in retrospect, may not have been such a bad thing.

And as the Tennessee Guerilla women point out, Thompson’s work “ethic” puts him in touch with most Americans:

They usually have the best Thompson bashing stuff.