Politics: The Republican Field

Ok, I am going to lay off of any Obama-Clinton sparring on this post and instead take shots at Republicans.

General Shots:

Good Math/Bad Math lampoons Redstate.com for whining about not getting free support for their software.

Sorry, but as a software guy, I just couldn’t resist mocking the sheer insane hypocrisy of this.

There’s a right-wing political site out there, called RedState.com. RedState is serious far-right – constantly bemoaning the nanny-state, the culture of entitlement, the virtues of personal responsibility, and so on. According to RedState, Social Security is bad – people should save for their own retirements, not rely on the government to take care of them. Socialized medicine must be avoided at all costs: people should pay for their own medical insurance, not expect the state to do it for them. And so on.

So, RedState initially set up their state on Scoop. [...]

After running for a while, Scoop wasn’t up to the load. So they switched to another free package, called Drupal. Drupal is, like Scoop, free, and distributed under the GPL. But Drupal didn’t have as many features as Scoop, which frustrated the RedState guys. So what does a good, responsible, self-sufficient, entrepreneurial organization like RedState do when the free software that they’re using isn’t up to the job that they want it to do?

Naturally: They whine about how no one will fix it for them for free, and how the unwillingness of people to do free work for them is just a totally unfair attempt by those nasty rotten liberals to censor them….

I love it!!!

Fundies: don’t want to get together with Muslims.

In October, a group of 138 Muslim scholars, clerics and intellectuals came together to issue an open letter entitled “A Common Word Between Us and You,” a statement that sought to declare common ground between Christianity and Islam.

A short time later, the Yale Center for Faith and Culture issued a response that was signed by 100 Christian theologians and ministers that welcomed the effort, stating:

Given the deep fissures in the relations between Christians and Muslims today, the task before us is daunting. And the stakes are great. The future of the world depends on our ability as Christians and Muslims to live together in peace. If we fail to make every effort to make peace and come together in harmony you correctly remind us that “our eternal souls” are at stake as well.

We are persuaded that our next step should be for our leaders at every level to meet together and begin the earnest work of determining how God would have us fulfill the requirement that we love God and one another. It is with humility and hope that we receive your generous letter, and we commit ourselves to labor together in heart, soul, mind and strength for the objectives you so appropriately propose.

Guess who is not happy about it?

An attempt by leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) to win friends and influence Muslims is alienating another group — evangelical Christians.

Reactions have been negative and strong. Islam expert Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo has called it a “betrayal” and a “sellout.” Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Seminary (Southern Baptist), termed it “naiveté that borders on dishonesty.”

…

Mohler said the agreement “sends the wrong signal” and contains basic theological problems, especially in “marginalizing” Jesus Christ. He also condemned the apology for the Crusades.

So speaking of fundies, let’s turn to my favorite:

Mike Huckabee

Huckabee:

Huckabee, believe it or not, is someone I want to like, but I have serious doubts about someone who is going to put stock in the literal truth of Bronze Age myths and who will think that some invisible sky-daddy will directly step in and literally change things for our benefit.
I honestly think that he simply isn’t up to the job, though he may be well intentioned.

He is not as moderate as claimed.

Huckabee’s embrace of creationism will hurt the whole country.

US ‘doomed’ if creationist president elected: scientists
A day after ordained Baptist minister Mike Huckabee finished first in the opening round to choose a Republican candidate for the White House, scientists warned Americans against electing a leader who doubts evolution.

“The logic that convinces us that evolution is a fact is the same logic we use to say smoking is hazardous to your health or we have serious energy policy issues because of global warming,” University of Michigan professor Gilbert Omenn told reporters at the launch of a book on evolution by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

“I would worry that a president who didn’t believe in the evolution arguments wouldn’t believe in those other arguments either. This is a way of leading our country to ruin,” added Omenn, who was part of a panel of experts at the launch of “Science, Evolution and Creationism.”

Former Arkansas governor Huckabee said in a debate in May that he did not believe in evolution. [...]

Of course, Huckabee takes direction directly from his god; note the constant use of the term “vertical”.

All in all, he just isn’t very bright.

Huckabee is an affable, funny, ordinary Joe on a shoestring budget who trounced a slick multimillionaire. But he’s also a crazy Christian. And he won because crazy Christians motivated by anti-Mormon bigotry voted for him.

In the Republican Party, hate trumps cash.

If Huckabee were Muslim, he’d be a radical Islamist. Denying separation of church and state, he said at a Baptist convention in 1998 that he got into politics because he “knew government didn’t have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives.”

A Muslim Huckabee would agree with the Taliban’s requirement that women wear burqas. Also in 1998, he signed a newspaper ad in USA Today supporting “biblical principles of marriage and family life,” including one that said that a “wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.”

The ex-preacher/ex-governor is entitled to his extreme religious beliefs. His inability to reason logically is what makes his political ascendancy frightening.

“I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk,” said Huckabee in 1992. (When asked about his remark in December 2007, he reaffirmed it: “Well I believe it would be–just like lying is sinful and stealing is sinful.”) Whether gays sin by having sex or by merely existing, I know not and do not care. What I know for certain is the difference between the unusual and the unnatural. [...]

As a radical Christian fundamentalist, Huckabee believes that every word of the Bible is literal truth–that Jonah actually hung out in the belly of a whale for 72 hours, that Samson really pushed down a stone building with brute force. He thinks God made the earth in six days, that the universe is 6000 years old. Never mind carbon-dating. “I do not necessarily buy into the traditional Darwinian theory, personally,” he said on his show on–get this!–the Arkansas Educational Television Network.

“If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, I’ll accept that,” Huckabee said recently. “I believe there was a creative process.”

So Huckabee is an idiot. Or is he pandering to idiots?

A 2005 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 53 percent of Americans believe that “God created humans in their present form exactly the way the Bible describes it.” Reported The Chicago Tribune: “The results closely paralleled those in polls taken over the last 20 years, in which nearly half of all Americans consistently agreed that ‘God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.’” In light of Tocqueville’s warning that democracy requires well-educated and well-informed citizens in order to function, it’s alarming that many of these people vote.

There’s no denying Huckabee’s folksy appeal. He sounds moderate, even populist, on issues like immigration, trade and the environment. But those sugar coatings conceal the bitter pill of anti-intellectualism, a toxin that has turned the American presidency into an entropic argument against evolution–from Washington and Jefferson, to Hoover and FDR, then to the Ford and the Bushes and finally…Huckabee?

“I’m not sure what in the world [my view of evolution] has to do with being president of the United States,” Huckabee says.

Those who deny scientific fact will be wrong (or lie) about anything. Misrepresenting hard and fast truth is unacceptable. Whether Huckabee is feigning idiocy to appeal to religious zealots or is honestly mentally deficient, journalists have a duty not to treat him like a serious candidate.

Of course, being mentally deficient doesn’t disqualify one from being a Republican presidential candidate: it is called “representative democracy”.

Mitt Romney: criticized by Republican J. C. Watts for having a lily white campaign staff.

[...]
WATTS: But you know what? Mitt Romney has no color on his campaign. He has no person — he has nobody on his campaign that looks like me, so I could say, are you going to be a role model to black kids? Wouldn’t you want to be their president as well?

I mean, I could have some problems with that.

So, again, it’s easy to take a snapshot of a person’s life and try to project that that is who they are. But I guarantee you, all 15, 16 candidates running for president, on the Republican and the Democrat side, they’re going to have something there in their past that they wouldn’t want anybody to know. So…

MALVEAUX: So, J.C., do you…

(CROSSTALK)

WATTS: Him or her without sin cast the first stone.

(CROSSTALK)

MALVEAUX: Do you have a problem with Romney’s campaign, that he doesn’t have people, black people on his campaign?

WATTS: Well, I think all campaigns should. I think you’re running for president of the United States to be the president for red, yellow, brown, black, and white.

And I have talked to some of his people — some of his people about that. You know, African-Americans will have problems with that, when they don’t see people that look like them in your inner circle making decisions.

And I think that probably had some bearing on the fact that didn’t show up at Morgan State, didn’t show up at the Urban League. Somebody that looks like me would have said, hey, look, Governor, you probably need to at least call Marc Morial and talk to him about this.

MALVEAUX: Is there any Republican candidate now who you feel reflects — has an accurate reflection of the population, that has enough black representation?

WATTS: I think Mike Huckabee — I think Mike Huckabee gets it. I think John McCain gets it. You know, those two, I know. I have worked with John McCain. So, this is not an endorsement, but those two, I know. I think they get it. [...]

Note: I am about 2/3 of the way through J. C. Watts’ book: What Color is a Conservative. I have to take pink bismuth liquid when I read it, but I am trying my best to be open minded.

Ron Paul: Interesting New Republic article about him.

[...]To understand Paul’s philosophy, the best place to start is probably the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Auburn, Alabama. The institute is named for a libertarian Austrian economist, but it was founded by a man named Lew Rockwell, who also served as Paul’s congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982. Paul has had a long and prominent association with the institute, teaching at its seminars and serving as a “distinguished counselor.” The institute has also published his books.

The politics of the organization are complicated–its philosophy derives largely from the work of the late Murray Rothbard, a Bronx-born son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and a self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who viewed the state as nothing more than “a criminal gang”–but one aspect of the institute’s worldview stands out as particularly disturbing: its attachment to the Confederacy. Thomas E. Woods Jr., a member of the institute’s senior faculty, is a founder of the League of the South, a secessionist group, and the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, a pro-Confederate, revisionist tract published in 2004. Paul enthusiastically blurbed Woods’s book, saying that it “heroically rescues real history from the politically correct memory hole.” Thomas DiLorenzo, another senior faculty member and author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, refers to the Civil War as the “War for Southern Independence” and attacks “Lincoln cultists”; Paul endorsed the book on MSNBC last month in a debate over whether the Civil War was necessary (Paul thinks it was not). In April 1995, the institute hosted a conference on secession at which Paul spoke; previewing the event, Rockwell wrote to supporters, “We’ll explore what causes [secession] and how to promote it.” Paul’s newsletters have themselves repeatedly expressed sympathy for the general concept of secession. In 1992, for instance, the Survival Report argued that “the right of secession should be ingrained in a free society” and that “there is nothing wrong with loosely banding together small units of government. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, we too should consider it.”

The people surrounding the von Mises Institute–including Paul–may describe themselves as libertarians, but they are nothing like the urbane libertarians who staff the Cato Institute or the libertines at Reason magazine. Instead, they represent a strain of right-wing libertarianism that views the Civil War as a catastrophic turning point in American history–the moment when a tyrannical federal government established its supremacy over the states. As one prominent Washington libertarian told me, “There are too many libertarians in this country … who, because they are attracted to the great books of Mises, … find their way to the Mises Institute and then are told that a defense of the Confederacy is part of libertarian thought.”

Paul’s alliance with neo-Confederates helps explain the views his newsletters have long espoused on race. Take, for instance, a special issue of the Ron Paul Political Report, published in June 1992, dedicated to explaining the Los Angeles riots of that year. “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began,” read one typical passage. According to the newsletter, the looting was a natural byproduct of government indulging the black community with “‘civil rights,’ quotas, mandated hiring preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black tv shows, black tv anchors, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda.” It also denounced “the media” for believing that “America’s number one need is an unlimited white checking account for underclass blacks.” To be fair, the newsletter did praise Asian merchants in Los Angeles, but only because they had the gumption to resist political correctness and fight back. Koreans were “the only people to act like real Americans,” it explained, “mainly because they have not yet been assimilated into our rotten liberal culture, which admonishes whites faced by raging blacks to lie back and think of England.” [...]

See also: Nikki’s Nest.

Rudy Giuliani Ok, I respect some of his social views, and I disagree strongly with his stance on the war. If I were forced to vote for a Republican, he would be my second choice. Frankly, there isn’t that much of a difference between him and Hillary Clinton, though there are some small ones.

Here is why he wouldn’t be my first choice

One of the most under-discussed aspects of Rudy Giuliani’s quest for the presidency is how politically shrewd he is. Giuliani was elected mayor of one of the great bastions of American liberalism despite being a former Reagan DOJ official and Republican prosecutor renowned for his merciless, at times humiliating, treatment of criminal defendants. And after four years of living under his rule, New Yorkers re-elected Giuliani in a landslide victory against an icon of traditional Big Apple liberalism, Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger. [...]

But the very characteristics that made Giuliani (for his first term) such a popular and effective mayor render him spectacularly unfit to be president. In many senses, the city that Giuliani inherited in 1993, languishing in chaos and craving order, is the antithesis of the United States of 2008, plagued by previously unthinkable abuses of executive power.

New York City in the mid-1990s presented an authoritarian mayor with the ultimate challenge: impose order on a city that was widely assumed to be ungovernable. But America in 2008 presents an authoritarian president with the ultimate fantasy: the ability to wield more power than any other human being in the world, with the fewest real limits in modern American history.

As constrained as a mayor’s power typically is, Giuliani never ceased pushing those limits. [...]

A President Giuliani would inherit an office bestowed with such dark powers as indefinite detention, interrogation methods widely considered to be torture, vast warrantless surveillance authority, and an impenetrable wall of secrecy secured by multiple executive and judicial instruments. Set all of that next to a submissive and impotent Congress and an equally supine media—to say nothing of the prospect of another terrorist attack to exacerbate every one of those factors—and it is hard to imagine a more toxic combination than Rudy Giuliani and the Oval Office.

Our political landscape has now tilted so heavily in favor of unchecked presidential prerogatives that even a lame duck, wildly unpopular, and universally discredited George W. Bush is rarely denied what he wants. With this framework now bolted in place, a newly elected, shrewd, and inherently aggressive Giuliani, whose certainty about his own rightness is matched only by his contempt for those who disagree, could easily run roughshod over any attempts to constrain his actions. [...]

Almost uniformly, Giuliani’s presidential campaign has been measured and highly disciplined, but he has had momentary lapses that expose the authoritarian impulses that New Yorkers know so well. In the midst of the September controversy over the MoveOn.org ad criticizing Gen. David Petraeus, Giuliani opined that the antiwar group “passed a line that we should not allow American political organizations to pass.”

Exactly as one would expect, Giuliani has enthusiastically endorsed virtually every one of the most controversial Bush/Cheney assertions of presidential power. He wants to keep Guantanamo open and mocks concerns over the use of torture, even derisively comparing sleep deprivation to the strain of his own campaign. He not only defends Bush’s warrantless surveillance, but does not recognize the legitimacy of any concerns relating to unchecked government power.

In April, Cato Institute’s president, Ed Crane, asked several candidates if they believed the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil, and detain them with no review of any kind. National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru reported Giuliani’s response: “The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently.”

In aggressively rejecting that such a power could exist, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive.” Yet Giuliani’s instinct was to assume that he would automatically possess that tyrannical power.

At a campaign event in New Hampshire a week later, Giuliani suggested that the president would even have what he called “inherent authority” to disregard a Congressional vote to defund the war in Iraq and could continue to prosecute it unilaterally. Not even the most radical of the Bush theorists of presidential omnipotence would endorse such an idea. In a February New York Times op-ed, former Bush DOJ attorney John Yoo acknowledged, “Congress has every power to end the war—if it really wanted to. It has the power of the purse.” [...]

It takes little imagination to apprehend the grave dangers from vesting in such a person virtually unlimited power to control the world’s most powerful military as well as a sprawling, federal bureaucracy.

John McCain: On one hand, I fear him the most as I am beginning to think that he would be the toughest to beat, especially if HRC is our nominee. On the other hand, though I agree with him on only a few issues (e. g., torture, a human solution to the illegal immigration problem), I think that he is a man of high character and would do the best job leading the country.

THIS is a case where my problem with the candidate is mostly issue driven; I have respect for him.