Is Huckabee a Liberal Plant?

If you are like me you haven’t been too impressed by Mike Huckabee.  Just something about the guy.  So now that the hit-jobs are coming out, I can’t say I’m that upset.  Douglas MacKinnon even wonders whether Huckabee is a liberal plant!

If you are the eventual Democratic nominee for President in 2008, who would you like to run against? Answer: A Republican you can beat.

Never mind about horserace stuff like that.  According to Club for Growth’s Steve Stephens you should be more concerned about Huckabee’s record and a taxer and a spender.  As David J. Saunders puts it:

Anti-tax groups, like the Club for Growth, have been at odds with Huckabee for a while, and at times it’s become quite heated...

In 2003, when Grover Norquist, president for Americans for Tax Reform, criticized Huckabee’s tendency to raise taxes instead of scaling back spending, he fired back.

“What do our critics want - to rip the feeding tubes out of an 8-year-old or an elderly person on Medicaid? Grover needs to run for governor somewhere, win, and then try to govern,” Huckabee told the Washington Times. “He makes it sound so easy.”

Yes.  No doubt.  But the truth is that keeping government under control is hard work, and if you aren’t hard at work pruning then you are letting it grow out of control.

And the quote about 8–year-olds and grannies is a liberal line, not a principled conservative one.

Because to a conservative the job of looking after 8–year-olds and grannies belongs to their family.  It does not belong to other peoples’ families through the tax system.

Libs Ante Up in War on Terror

Many conservatives are angry about the naked political slanting in the latest National Intelligence Estimate.  How do we suddenly know with high confidence that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003?  But I am more sanguine.

With the NIE the opponents of President Bush within the administration have put a bet on the table.  It’s one thing to be embarrassing the Bushies with embarrassing leaks.  It’s another thing when you suddenly up and say: Hey, look, No Nukes!  All of a sudden you have actually done something, and in today’s political climate that means that you become a target.

For instance, Kenneth R. TImmerman took a look at the NIE and found something different than what he was supposed to find.

What the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran actually said for the first time in an official, United States government document released to the public, is that Iran was actively pursuing nuclear weapons in 2003.

Well!  That’s certainly something to think about!

We conservatives must realize that the battle over the war on terror is a multigenerational thing, both within and without the United States.  We can’t win in one election cycle and put it behind us.  It’s going to be like the Cold War where the Democrats played a game of now we’re with you, now we’re against you, depending on the mood in the crazy left. 

So it’s good that the liberal mid-level bureaucrats have put out their marker.  That gives our side something to shoot at.

And anyway it doesn’t change the strategic situation.  Iran is a revolutionary power that the United States wants to keep under control.  Nukes or no nukes.

Romney's American Creed

You can read the MSM’s hostility to religion any time you open a newspaper or tune into a network news broadcast.  Here’s CNN on presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s speech on religion and America December 6, 2007.

White House hopeful Mitt Romney on Thursday articulated his position on the role of religion in America, but avoided details about his personal faith.

What is it about these people?  What is it?

Well we know.  Or modern secular educated elite thinks that it has a better belief system than the one developed by our Judeo-Christian tradition and manifested in the religious culture of the United States. And you can see why.

The pluralistic non-established religions of the United States cannot be controlled by the secular educated elite.  That is why they are trying to create an established secular religion with its “teachers” and “counselors” in every public institution of education.

But Mitt Romney is an American, not a secular American.  And the danger is that he can talk, as a presidential candidate, over the heads of the media directly to the American people. 

He can appeal directly to the American tradition that goes back to the founders, the tradition that the secular educated elite want to replace.

He can talk, as he did about the first prayer breakfast of the United States of America, before there was a United States.  It happened in the fall of 1774.  Given the dark clouds of war closing in, the members of the Continental Congress felt the need to pray.  As told by Romney:

But there were objections. ’They were too divided in religious sentiments’, what with Episcopalians and Quakers, Anabaptists and Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Catholics.

"Then Sam Adams rose, and said he would hear a prayer from anyone of piety and good character, as long as they were a patriot.

"And so together they prayed, and together they fought, and together, by the grace of God, they founded this great nation.

That’s the sort of thing that our secular educated friends don’t want to hear, and they don’t want you to hear.  And if they had their way no American in public life would dare to recount that incident, at least not without irony or scare quotes.

That is why there is a culture war being fought in the United States.  It is a war between those who want to continue the Judeo-Christian culture of the United States and those who want to replace it with a secular culture.

Gingrich pushes platform in Iowa

Newt’s in Iowa and running for VP.  He’s also pushing his latest update on the Contract with America, a poll-tested set of issues called “Platform for America.”  Here’s what he’s pushing, according to Ralph Z. Hollow.

The former speaker said his appearances in Iowa this week are "about a single-page flat tax" (82 percent), a "moment of silent prayer in school" (94 percent) and the "death penalty for anyone carrying out a terrorist act in the United States" (79 percent).

Newt says that the problem is that:

this is a center-right country caught between an incompetent right-wing party and a ruthlessly organized, energized, militant, minority left-wing party.

You can’t argue with that.  But the question is: why?

My answer is that the Republican Party would like to roll back the vast government edifice, as in:

Pensions: 6.2 percent GDP
Health Care: 6.2 percent GDP
Education: 5.7 percent GDP
Welfare: 3.0 percent GDP
source: usgovernmentspending.com

But they can’t because the Democratic Party stands “ruthlessly organized, energized, militant,” ready to defend every last program to the last 0.1 percent of GDP. 

Derb Admits He's Bored With Election

The federal government makes such a mess of everything that there’s not much any of the candidates can do.  And they are good candidates. Writes John Derbyshire:

I even like some of these guys. War hero... confident and successful businessman/governor... tough no-nonsense mayor... laid-back, witty showbiz type with good conservative creds... There’s plenty to like, almost an embarrassment of riches.

Leave aside the mess in housing, the declining dollar, the mess in Iraq.  There’s immigration.  What can a president do about that?

I think we’ve arrived at a point where the president may propose, but the courts, the federal bureaucracy, the interest groups, the lobbies and trial lawyers, and the ACLU, and CAIR, and MEChA, and LULAC dispose.

So what’s the point?  Better wait until things get really screwed up.

I may be bored, like Derb, but I’m not idle.

Right now, I’m loading up data on state and local government spending into my usgovernmentspending.com site. As the billions roll by, year after year, you ask: What are these people doing with all that money?  It's just wasted, isn't it?  Every last billion.  It's all about government doing what people could be, should be doing for themselves.

And there's another thing. This is a democracy, and the way democracy works is that the other chaps get to have a go.  Especially when the other chaps are mad as hell.  So it's time for the Democrats to get back to the White House.

in the bigger picture we are playing out the string on the welfare state right now. We know, from the Reagan era, that the Democrats are not ready to talk about reform yet.  We need another decade of welfare state ineptitude and waste and self-dealing to play out before we conservatives will get the chance for another wave of reform.

It's happening in Britland right now.  Ten years ago, the Labour Party was elected on the theme of "education, education, education."  What do you think has happened?  Britain has dropped in the OECD league tables, according to the Daily Telegraph.

In reading 15-year-olds in the UK dropped from seventh in 2000 to 17th... In maths, pupils fell from eighth to 24th... In science, secondary school students in the UK dropped from fourth to 14th.

And so, wonder of wonders, the Conservative Party is rising in the polls, and leader David Cameron is starting to look like a man who could be Prime Minister.

The point is that there is a flow in the tide of events, and the best thing is to be ready when the tide is flowing in your favor.

When the tide is ebbing, it’s best to anchor and wait for the tide to turn.

Chavez Loses Vote--Just

Let’s give one cheer for the failure of President Hugo Chavez to make himself president-for-life.  Venezuelans voted down his proposed constitutional “reforms.”  As Frank Bajak reports:

Foes of the reform effort - including Roman Catholic leaders, media freedom groups, human rights groups and prominent business leaders - said it would have granted Chavez unchecked power and imperiled basic rights.

It’s a sad fact of the modern age that the folks just arriving in the city from the farm—the working class, if you like—experience life as a battle against the powerful. 

So they vote for leaders who will fight for them against the powerful.

Unfortunately nearly all such leaders end up fighting the economy and leading their people to economic ruin.

Because whatever the working class may think, the market economy gives them the best prospects for a decent life—both in the short term and in the long term.

What workers should be doing is voting for politicians who will dismantle all the economic privileges that have been put in place to help the existing elite.  But they don’t.  They think that the answer to their economic struggle is to vote for a guy who will give them privileges.

When you make a mistake like that in this world, it ends up costing you big time.  And it looks as thought Venezuelans are already beginning to experience the inevitable result of a government that meddles recklessly with the national economy.

What is unconscionable is that media, educational, and cultural elites won’t tell the people the truth: that privileges, subsidies, and government handouts harm the people they are supposed to help.

Why won’t they? Probably because they too are clueless about the extraordinary system of democratic capitalism that we have built in the last two hundred years. After all, if you wrote for a living, taught school for a living, or acted in movies or TV what would you know about the reality of making products and services for the consumer?

So Bush Was Right on Stem Cells

One thing you can say about President Bush.  He makes a decision and then accepts the consequences.  Back in 2001 he decided to restrict the use of federal funds in research on embryonic stem cells.

As we know, Democrats decided that they had an issue.  So they dragged out helpless victims and Ron Reagan to argue that stem cells would help the blind see and the lame walk.  Presidential candidate John Edwards got in on the act, as you would expect.

Obviously the only thing that stood in the way of a medical miracle was the president and his fundamentalist Christian morality and the theocrats who supported him.

But last week the New York Times reported that two scientists. James A. Thomson and Shinya Yamanaka, had found a way of making stem cells equivalent to embryonic stem cells without using embryos.

As Charles Krauthammer puts it:

A decade ago, Thomson was the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells. Last week, he (and Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka) announced one of the great scientific breakthroughs since the discovery of DNA: an embryo-free way to produce genetically matched stem cells.

He highlights a quote of Thomson’s:

If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough.

Really?  I thought only knuckle-dragging Bible-thumpers had a problem with embryonic stem cell research.

It all points up the fact that President Bush is a serious man who is not afraid to make serious decisions.

When you make serious decisions it helps to have a serious politico-religious world view.  For most people, that means taking a fully worked out politico-religious system—such as, for example, Christianity—and using it as a guide.  President Bush, who had a less than perfect youth like many well-born baby-boomers, became a serious Christian when the time came to grow up.  Obviously this belief system—and we all have one—informs his decisions about government policy.

The reason why this is helpful is that Christianity, like Anglo-Saxon law, is an accumulation of centuries of actual human experience in dealing with serious decisions about life and death.  Over the centuries hundreds of lawyers and judges have worked on our great edifice of law, adapting it slowly in the light of new cases and conflicts that come up for adjudication.  The same thing is true with religion.

In our modern era we have a lot of people who want to throw up all the accumulated wisdom and start from scratch with a new system better adapted to modern times.  Unfortunately—and you may have noticed this—starting over means making all the mistakes of our ancestors all over again and learning from them the hard way.

In the twentieth century the hard way added up to about 200 million human deaths in world wars and terrors.

Anyway, now it turns out that President Bush was right.  We don’t need to use human embryos in stem cell research.  After all the fuss, the president looks like a serious man who thought seriously about an issue, talked to all the experts, and made a serious decision. 

Quite often, more often than you might think, when you do that you get to be right.