Tag: Campaign 2012

Huckabee and the Boy Scouts

Jon Ponder
David Huckabee in mug shot from weapons arrest
David Huckabee in mug shot from an April 2007 arrest on weapons charges

On Day Three of Mike Huckabee’s Lie-apalooza Tour this week, in an interview with hate-group radio host Bryan Fischer, Huckabee said this:

At age 18, Huckabee’s son David was fired by the Scouts as a camp counselor after he and another counselor captured a stray dog, hanged him by the neck, slit his throat and stoned him to death.

HUCKABEE: “…I do think [Pres. Obama] has a different worldview and I think it’s, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas.”

Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist preacher, former governor of Arkansas and Fox News host, first got himself into rhetorical trouble on Monday when, on another right-wing radio show, he opined that Obama’s worldview had been warped by having grown up in Kenya under the influence of his paternal grandfather, who, according to Huckabee, had been involved in the Mau Mau Revolt against the British in the 1950s.

As evidence of how Obama’s worldview had been distorted by his Mau Mau revolutionary grandfather, Huckabee cited the president’s decision early in his term to return to the British Embassy a bust of Winston Churchillthat had been on loan in the Oval Office. Churchill was Britain’s prime minister during the revolt.

Except for the fact that Obama returned the Churchill piece — which he replaced with a bust of Abraham Lincoln — all of that was a lie. Obama was in his late twenties when he first stepped foot in Kenya. He met his paternal grandfather for the first time and only time then. There is no evidence his grandfather was involved in the uprising, other than a less-than-reliable recollection of it decades later by his then-87-year-old widowed third wife.

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Hey, Sarah, How’s That Dopey-Ragey Thing Workin’ out for Ya?

Jon Ponder

art-palin-dopeSo far, 2011 — all 23 days of it — has been a bad year for Sarah Palin’s presidential campaign.

First, her response to the mass murder attack on Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords on Jan.8 gave voters invaluable insight into how, as president, she would perform under pressure. Pres. Palin, they learned, would make the crisis — say an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel — about herself and then give a speech from the Oval Office in which she used her limited oratorical skills to dress down her critics.

Last week, two polls found that Palin’s approval rating had dropped to 38 percent. Her disapproval rating in the Gallup poll was 53 percent and 56 percent in the CNN survey. In Sarah Palin’s own Alaska, her approval is 33 percent.

Now Palin has come in fourth in a presidential straw poll of Republican activists in New Hampshire — behind vice presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty and just a notch above her even crazier doppelganger, Rep. Michele Bachmann.

Palin received just 7 percent of the vote — which is eerily the same as the 7 percent she received last February in the straw poll at CPAC, the wingnut confab sponsored by the hate group, American Family Association.

Until recently, pundits were blue-skying the 2012 Republican primaries as playing out like this. Palin wins the Iowa caucuses, comes in second in New Hampshire after Mitt Romney, the former governor of next-door Massachusetts, and then rolls into the South Carolina, a hotbed of rage-addicted tea baggers — in other words, her base — and where Mormons like Romney are considered satanic cultists. By taking two of the first three, she becomes an unstoppable force and sews up the nomination.

That scenario, which took a beating after Tucson, came apart yesterday in New Hampshire. Here’s how Fox News reported it online:

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Four Days After Saying She Might Run for President, Palin Compares Herself to Ronald Reagan

Jon Ponder

You know, I agree with that, that those standards have to be high for someone who would ever want to run for president, like, umm, wasn’t Ronald Reagan an actor? Wasn’t he in Bedtime for Bonzo, Bozo? So that Ronald Reagan was an actor. Now, look it — I’m not in a reality show. I have eight episodes documenting Alaska’s resources, what it is that we can contribute to the rest of the U.S. to economically and physically secure our union. And my family comes along on the ride because I am family. Family is — and my family comes along on the ride to document these eight episodes for The Learning Channel and Discovery Channel.

– Sarah Palin, comparing herself to Ronald Reagan four days after she told Entertainment Tonight reporter Mary Hart that she might run for president.

Two-Thirds Say Palin Unqualified for Presidency – Result Unchanged Since Spring

Pensito Editors

67%

Percent of all registered voters who view Sarah Palin as not qualified to be president, according to a new ABC/Washington Post poll — a figure that has not changed since spring. In an interview with Mary Hart on “Entertainment Tonight” yesterday, Palin all but acknowledged that she plans to run for president in 2012.

CA Gov: Reports Show Whitman Has Spent $163 Mil, Brown $25 Mil

Jon Ponder

$163,000,000

Amount Republican billionaire Meg Whitman has spent on her campaign for governor of California, so far. By contrast, Democratic candidate Jerry Brown has spent $25 million. But money can’t buy you love, as the song said — Brown has led Whitman in every poll taken since Labor Day, at least, and Whitman’s favorability rating was under 40 percent in a recent Los Angeles Times poll.

Charlotte a Strong Contender to Host 2012 Democratic Convention

Jon Ponder

The tower in the center is the home office of Bank of America, designed by Cesar Pelli
The tower in the center is the home office of Bank of America, designed by Cesar Pelli
I am rooting for my former adopted hometown:

Four cities are officially in the running to host the 2012 Democratic National Convention. But after a recent site visit from about a dozen Democratic Party representatives, Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx likes his city’s chances. Not that he would say one negative word about St. Louis, Cleveland or Minneapolis. He would rather talk about Charlotte’s “great new facilities” and “vibrant, can-do attitude.”

“For almost an entire generation, the Democratic Party has had a hands off attitude toward the South,” Foxx told me on Friday. Though it was barely 8 a.m., we watched as workers in a city that keeps bankers’ hours grabbed their coffee-to-go on the way to their offices. “The storyline is making the South a battleground,” the youthful Democratic mayor said, “coming to a state that has been significantly impacted by the economic downturn, proving its resilience every day.”

The ‘Ick Factor,’ And Why Huckabee Will Never Be President

Jon Ponder
Left: Huckabee family several years ago, Mike and Janet Huckabee more recently
Left: Huckabee family several years ago, Mike and Janet Huckabee more recently

The New Yorker has profile of Mike Huckabee up that explores the possibility that he may be the Republicans’ “best hope” to take on Pres. Obama in 2012. If he is, there’s at least one quote from the interview on social issues that will likely turn off reasonable independent voters (and any of the few remaining Republicans who are rational) down the road:

I asked him to explain his rationale for opposing gay rights. “I do believe that God created male and female and intended for marriage to be the relationship of the two opposite sexes,” he said. “Male and female are biologically compatible to have a relationship. We can get into the ick factor, but the fact is two men in a relationship, two women in a relationship, biologically, that doesn’t work the same.” [Emphasis added.]

“Ick” is in the mind of the beholder. For example — and with apologies in advance if you are eating as you read this, dear reader — but imagine just for a second, Huckabee and his wife Janet belly to belly making the beast with two backs, doing the nasty and hiding the salami — fill in your own euphemism, just so long as your imaginary Huckabees are doing it missionary style.

See? Ick. Who wants to think of these two bruisers having sex? No one. And yet, Mike Huckabee — a supposedly serious Republican candidate for president in 2012 — rests the foundation of his justification for the use of constitutional amendments in 45 states and federal laws like the Defense of Marriage Act to restrict millions of Americans’ civil right to marry a picture in his puerile mind of what these people do in bed.

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Maniac Predicts Palin Will Declare on Reagan’s 100th Birthday

Buck Banks

Conservatives4Palin

The wingnuts over at Conservatives4Palin.com (there’s no Liberals4Palin.com, I checked) believe that Sarah Palin will announce she’s running for president of the United States Feb. 6, 2011.

Because that’s the 100th anniversary of the nativity of Ronald Reagan, the Jesus of Conservatism, silly.

The brains behind this prediction belong to Kevin DuJan, founder and editor of HillBuzz.org, who attended two recent speeches by Palin in Illinois, and provided some “analysis” that is nothing if not trenchant. But first, we should qualify DuJan as an analyst with this excerpt from his analysis:

Todd’s there, in a sharp suit with colorful tie, standing behind dark, heavy curtains. He’s off to the side, out of the way backstage, watching his wife fire up the awesome on all cylinders before enthusiastic crowds hanging on her every word. There’s a twinkle in his husky blue eyes and the first twitch of a smile on a crisply-goateed impish face straining desperately to remain serious, surrounded as he is by burly men in suits with ear pieces, cell phones, iPads, and itineraries aplenty. Though the Palins are very much in the national big time now, and will be for the rest of their lives, Todd’s seemingly still very much “just Todd” — a regular, huntin’, fishin’, snowmachinin’, g’-droppin’, dude from Wasilla, married to an incredible woman he still can’t believe he was lucky enough to sweep off her feet. That smile’s a “I can’t believe we’re doing this” smile, married perfectly to a “What did I ever do to deserve a woman as awesome as this?” grin. It’s a match as natural, easy-going, and honest as the Palins themselves.

Bit gushy, ain’t it. What are “husky blue eyes?” And I never thought of Todd Palin as having an “impish face.” He just looks like another none-too-bright shit-kicker to me.

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