An “Idiot” Responds

Outraged Huckabee supporter Chad Haynie sent the following missive yesterday. I respond after each relevant section, and would—as always—appreciate your thoughts.

As a long time supporter of Mike Huckabee, who is not an “evangelical” I take serious offense to your over all assertion that supporters of Mike Huckabee are idiots. Even though you have already in a sense called me a idiot, I will try to stay to your “email guidelines” in my breakdown and response to your article.
First of all in your opening sentence you say Gov. Huckabee is not qualified for public office. What qualifications do you suggest a candidate have?

I suggested, in this week’s column, that clarity of thought is a major qualification. In particular, someone who does not believe in evolution is not qualified to hold public office—not because it really matters that we’re descended from apes, but because anyone who doesn’t understand that is too stupid to hold power over other citizens.

Huckabee was a Republican Governor in a Democratic state for over 10 years and he was also a Lieutenant Governor for over 3 years before his term as Governor.
No other candidate in either party, running for President has such an extensive resume running a government.

I refer to the above. Though it is surprising that Huckabee managed to govern Arkansas without accidentally burning it down, his resume doesn’t refute my assertion that he is either an idiot, or pretending to be an idiot, and either way should not be president.

And how exactly is Huckabee a “crazy Christian” as you put it? Is it that you consider all Christians who believe in the Bible, the basic principles of Christianity? It is not really clear in your article if you believe Christians in general are crazy or just Christians who have specific beliefs that differ from your own. I would appreciate you clarifying that, if you do not mind.

I think it was clear enough, but I’ll restate my belief that Huckabee is a crazy Christian because he thinks the earth is 6000 years old. Many—nay, most—Christians don’t believe the mythology of Genesis to be literally true. Thank God!

I was in Iowa last week sir and I can assure you that it was not hate from crazy Christians that beat Mitt Romney and all his money. It was a true hope in this country. An optimism from voters for an optimistic candidate.

Uh-huh. And if Romney were a Baptist, where would Huckabee be?

My second large question to you: Have you ever met Mike Huckabee? After reading your article it seems like you have no idea who Mike Huckabee or what he really believes in. You say he believes in many things that he does not and are incorrect in many of your obvious assumptions of his beliefs.
You say Huckabee could be a radical Islamist terrorist, the same people who murder thousands each year.
You say he “denied separation of church and state”. Yet, in reality, Huckabee ran a secular government for over 10 years. There is no evidence what so ever that he tried to incorporate Christianity as an official religion in Arkansas or establish religion into government as you imply.

This last point is not true. He believes that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public schools, as if they were two sides of an issue. There’s actually one side, and there is no issue—evolution is a fact. Feigning evenhandedness by “allowing” evolution to be taught alongside the patent lie of creationism is a clever ruse to mainstream a lie.

You try to paint him out to be a nut job, quoting him from when he was talking at a Baptist convention. How dare someone say “…government didn’t have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives.” at a CHRISTIAN convention.

The fact that he was pandering to Baptists at a Baptist convention is hardly an excuse. It’s just an unsurprising detail. I was taking him to task for the pandering, after all. His statement, though within the bounds of free speech, is anathema to those of us who believe that America is best served by preserving the constitutional separation of church and state. Huckabee is running for public office, a secular office, of a secular state. He should not advocate Christianity or state that government doesn’t have answers. If it doesn’t, why is he running for president?

Do you have a personal vendetta against Huckabee or Christianity?

No.

Everything you state in your article trying to paint Huckabee out wacko, are basic fundamentals of Christianity, not some far out radical belief as you try to imply.
There is nothing “extreme” about the beliefs, they are basic beliefs of Christianity.

Not true. His beliefs are extreme, radical and ridiculous. Anyone who shares them ought to be mocked.

Traditional, yes, but they are not “extreme”.
Homosexuality is sinful in Christianity, again this is not a single radical belief of Huckabee, but a simple belief in Christianity. I am originally from Atlanta and have a handful of gay and lesbian friends. My best friend in high school, a Christian, came out of the closet in his senior year. He acknowledge that being gay was a sin. Mike Huckabee does not try to persecute homosexuals, he simply stated his belief that it is a sin. Having sex out of wedlock is a sin as well, just as a number of things are sins. He didn’t say that homosexuals will burn in hell or they should be arrested. He said it was a sin.

Calling someone’s behavior sinful is the first chapter in a story we’ve read before, one that ends with ovens and gas chambers. Homosexuality is not sinful, not according to mainstream Christianity and not according to common sense. Sin is only committed when someone is harmed as a result. Sin is only committed when free will is involved. Sexual orientation isn’t a choice. Sexual behavior is a personal matter.

I don’t know where you were in 1992, but in the south HIV/AIDS was still a very mysterious disease and the majority of people in the south, especially pastors who spend very little time researching diseases, knew much about HIV or AIDS. He has said since that he did not know much about AIDS at the time of the comment and has stated on numerous occasions in this race that he does not believe HIV and AIDS patients should be isolated.

Absurd! It was well known by the mid-1980s that AIDS could not be spread by casual contact. The South does not have different science than the rest of the country.

Question: Have you been too Guantánamo Bay? Gov. Huckabee has on a number of occasions and for you, who I highly doubt has ever been to Guantánamo, to make statements such as you did just goes to show you are being spoon fed the liberal democrat talking points.

As has been well established, visitors to Gitmo are not allowed to meet with the prisoners at all, much less meet with them in private, where they might share their concerns free of fear of their guards. Huckabee saw the usual dog-and-pony show. What happens there is well known, and horrifying to anyone with the slightest modicum of morality.

Darwinism is not a fact as you imply, it is scientific theory. Huckabee has never claimed scientific elements of evolution did not occur and he has said that on national television.
Huckabee has stated in more than one debate on national television that he does not believe every word of the Bible in a “literal sense” and has specifically said that stories such as Jonah being eaten by a whale did not happen in a literal sense and for you to say that he believes just the opposite is journalism at an all time low. For you to write as you know someones thoughts, when that person has stated publicly that they believe something else is pathetic.

Oh? Where? He has repeatedly said that he believes every word of the Bible.

And by the way, there are tens of millions of Americans who do not believe in Darwinism, including many scientist.

All of whom are idiots. (And there are no scientists.)

Again, I remind you, Darwinism is not fact, it is a scientific theory.
“If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, I’ll accept that,” Huckabee said. For once you actually represent him correctly. He does not want to impose his beliefs on anyone else. He doesn’t want to replace Biology textbooks with the Bible. He simply has his beliefs and has no problems with those who differ. Clearly not a stance you are too familiar with.
“I’m not sure what in the world [my view of evolution] has to do with being president of the United States,” Huckabee says.
You use that quote and then still do not give a reason of how it is relevant to being President of the United States.

Sure I do. Check out the last paragraph of my column.

If he was running for your local board of education, wanting to take evolution out of textbooks then I could see it as a viable question, but it has nothing at all to do with someone running for President.
In your article you say “Those who deny scientific fact will be wrong (or lie) about anything. Misrepresenting hard and fast truth is unacceptable.”
What scientific fact has Huckabee denied? The only thing he denies is Darwinism, which is far from being scientific fact. It is simply a theory. You have every right to believe in that theory, but just because you think it happened does not mean it is fact, nor does it give you the right to go around and persecute those who do not believe the same thing you do.
The only thing being misrepresented here is Mike Huckabee. You do nothing but misrepresent him and it is obvious you did very little research before you wrote this article, solely taking democratic talking point lies about Huckabee and sowing them into one huge misrepresentation of a honest and decent man. A man who did nothing to you.
Unlike you, Huckabee does not persecute others for their beliefs differing from his own. He doesn’t write nasty and dishonest columns about those who differ from him.
He is a honest, decent human being who quite obviously has much more dignity than yourself.
Huckabee has never tried to force any beliefs on anyone. He ran a secular Government for over a decade never coming close to establishing religion into the Arkansas government. Just because he doesn’t hide his faith like some politicians, he is somehow crazy? I just don’t get that.
I would much rather have someone who is totally honest rather than someone who believes someone, but hides those beliefs. Do you prefer politicians that are pathological liars and hide their real beliefs?
If anything we should be thanking Mike Huckabee for being honest, when almost every other politician today lies through their teeth to get elected. Huckabee clearly states his opinions and beliefs, so people like yourself will know where he really stands.
Is that a bad thing?
I would greatly appreciate a response, since after all, you did call me an idiot.

I’ll give you that: Huckabee certainly isn’t hiding his moronitude.

COLUMN: IDIOTS (HEART) HUCKABEE

The Media’s Dangerous Tolerance of Anti-Intellectualism

Mike Huckabee isn’t qualified for public office. He may not be smart enough to hold a job. Yet he could become our next president.

Huckabee’s upset victory in the Iowa caucuses is cited as evidence that American democracy still works. “At a Friday night event,” right-wing columnist William Kristol opined in the New York Times, “[Huckabee] played bass with a local rock band, Mama Kicks. One secular New Hampshire Republican’s reaction: ‘Gee, he’s not some kind of crazy Christian.”

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.

Insofar as the majority of people are straight, heterosexuality is the norm of sexual orientation. Yet it hardly follows that gays, estimated to account for between two and five percent of the U.S. population, are aberrant. It may be (and probably is) that it’s normal for two to five percent of people to be gay. Only two percent of Americans have red hair, but redheads aren’t unnatural. The vast majority of the world’s biomass is composed of krill and insects, but humans aren’t abnormal.

During his 1992 run for Senate, Huckabee called for HIV/AIDS patients to be forcibly isolated from the general population. “If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus,” he argued, “we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague. It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population…” Even though it was common knowledge at the time, Huckabee apparently didn’t know that HIV/AIDS cannot be spread by casual contact (like “a genuine plague”).

Similarly, Huckabee has said that “extraordinary means [are] being taken to make sure these detainees [at Guantánamo] are being given really every consideration.” Again, he’s entitled to his outlandish views–in this case, supporting the kidnapping, torture, force-feeding and long-term imprisonment of children as young as 13 without charging them with a crime or allowing them to be represented by a lawyer. But when he describes this inhumane treatment as giving detainees “really every consideration,” he’s either dumb or lying.

Nearly 150 years after Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, the scientific debate over natural selection is as settled as the medieval controversy over heliocentrism. Evolution is a fact. But Mike Huckabee denies this fact.
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.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

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The 2008 Campaign: Huckabee, Obama Win Iowa

The New York Times has a funny line today: “Mr. Obama’s victory in this overwhelmingly white state was a powerful answer to the question of whether America was prepared to vote for a black person for president.”

Well, Obama is black*, not black. It does answer the question of whether a biracial guy can get votes in white America, though.

What Iowa did not do on the Democratic side is establish a clear frontrunner. Obama took Iowa. Hillary should still take New Hampshire. Edwards is still in the race, holding out for South Carolina and Florida, where stands an excellent chance.

I think Hillary’s candidacy is mortally wounded, but we’ll see. This is now an Obama-Edwards race. Lord, please let Edwards win the nomination–he’d be the first political figure in my lifetime I actually admired. He’d get us out of Iraq and he’d fuck over the corporations. Obama is an accomodationist; if he wins, it’ll be the do-nothing Nineties all over again.

If anything nasty comes out about Obama or he has a meltdown, Edwards wins. If not, then, well, I don’t know.

On the Republican side, David Brooks’ assertion in today’s Times that the GOP will turn to McCain is laughable. McCain is done. Huckabee is the clear and present frontrunner, propelled by anti-Mormon bigotry. Nice party you got there! It is an amazing victory, considering how little money he had to spend, representing the victory of hatred over cash. Romney could and should win New Hampshire, but you never know.

Huckabee may be nice and slim and stuff, but if he wins the presidency we’ll look back on George W. Bush and wonder why we didn’t appreciate him when we had him. Huckabee is either an idiot, or worse, a fake idiot who pretends to be dumb to pander to idiots.

A person who doesn’t believe in Evolution should be barred from holding any public office. Anyone who doesn’t believe in Evolution is too stupid to get the French fries into the big basket.

Mensatocracy

The blog Right Wing News has listed me as #1 in its Most Obnoxious Quotes of 2007, or whatever it’s called, and the right-wing blogosphere are spreading it around.

The “quote” in question, however, isn’t a quote in the sense that it’s something I wrote or said in an interview. It’s a line from one of my cartoons, which was called “Mensatocracy” (dated October 22, 2007).

Anyway, I received the following email, which is fairly representative of the response I’ve been getting:

I just want to tell you that I found your comic suggesting that troops were stupid, (http://www.gocomics.com/rallcom/2007/10/22/) and that natural selection will somehow make the US closer to utopia to be bordering on incoherence, tasteless, and utterly offensive. I have no military background; I don’t support the war, lest you think this has anything to do with ideology. I urge you to do your research on what sort of people actually go to Iraq. Guess what? They’re people who either need to go for monetary reasons, or feel obligated to go [and some are legally obligated to go, which means they have no choice in the matter. See: The National Guard]. You may not feel the compulsion to go fight in the war [and neither do I] but get off your high-horse and realize that just because you think the war is ridiculous or being fought for a bad cause does not in any way invalidate the utterly noble act of fighting for this great nation.

First, this cartoon was a response to and riff upon the cult Mike Judge movie “Idiocracy.” The reference to Mike Judge is an indication of that. If you haven’t seen “Idiocracy,” you’re probably not going to understand my cartoon. (And you’re missing out on one of the most effective cinematic satires in years.)

That said, I’d like to take this email point by point, because it contains so many common fallacies:

I urge you to do your research on what sort of people actually go to Iraq. Guess what? They’re people who either need to go for monetary reasons, or feel obligated to go

Nobody “needs to go [into the military] for monetary reasons.” We all have free will. Right now here in New York, it’s 13 degrees outside. There’s a homeless guy out in front of my building, shivering like a bastard. He didn’t go to Iraq; as far as we know, he didn’t kill anyone. If he dies today, he dies innocent of war crimes. He is better off, morally, than anyone willing to shoot someone who has done them no harm for a (small) salary. And seriously: there are other jobs. Work at McDonald’s, for God’s sake.

And who feels “obligated to go”? What does that mean?

People make choices. No one ever said that one choice would be easy. But one is always better.

[and some are legally obligated to go, which means they have no choice in the matter. See: The National Guard].

Wrong. There is no draft. National Guardsmen volunteered. They signed a blank check to the government that allows it to send them to fight any war, including an illegal and immoral one (which they all have been since 1945). They knew the deal when they signed up.

You may not feel the compulsion to go fight in the war [and neither do I] but get off your high-horse and realize that just because you think the war is ridiculous or being fought for a bad cause does not in any way invalidate the utterly noble act of fighting for this great nation.

Fighting for this nation would, indeed, be a noble (or at least morally acceptable) act. Those who fight in Iraq and Afghanistan are actually hurting the United States, making it more vulnerable to terrorism in the future by destroying our international reputation. And only an idiot thinks we have to fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here.

COLUMN: An Iron First in a Velvet Glove

How American Democracy Relies on Fascism

What would you do if you learned that Bush Administration officials wanted to round up thousands of Americans and throw them into concentration camps?

For all we know, there is no slippery slope. It’s entirely possible that extraordinary rendition, eliminating habeas corpus, and the torture camps at Guantánamo and elsewhere are exactly what the government says they are–tools for fighting terrorists, not domestic political opponents. But how likely is it?

History is clear: Over and over again, the U.S. government places fascists in powerful positions. Once in office, they exploit wars and national tragedies to roll back hard-won freedoms. They’re Democrats as well as Republicans.

As has happened with increasing frequency in recent years, another blockbuster story revealing the anti-democratic impulse within the top echelon of the U.S. government has appeared and vanished overnight. According to Cold War-era files declassified last week, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover repeatedly advised President Harry Truman to arrest “all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, jail them in military prisons and try them before kangaroo tribunals that “will not be bound by the rules of evidence.”

“For a long period of time the FBI has been accumulating the names, identities and activities of individuals found to be potentially dangerous to the internal security through investigation,” Hoover wrote in a 1950 memo. “These names have been compiled in an index, which index has been kept up to date.”

Capitalizing on anti-communist hysteria at the start of the Korean War, Hoover asked Truman to preemptively detain 12,000 people, 97 percent of them American citizens, in order to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.”

Hoover was a lunatic. Truman ought to have fired him on the spot. Instead, in September 1950 Congress took his advice and passed a law authorizing the detention of “dangerous radicals” if the president declared a national emergency. Truman signed it. In fact, he declared such an emergency three months later. No one knows why, but the president never actually followed through with mass arrests. Hoover’s “subversives”–people suspected of left-wing political sympathies–remained free. He was wrong. There were no acts of sabotage.

It wasn’t the first time the government went “crazy.”

Between 1919 and 1921 the Bureau of Investigation (predecessor of the FBI) carried out the Palmer Raids, named for Alexander Palmer, Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general. The BOI rounded up 10,000 lefties, anarchists and foreigners on a list compiled by a young J. Edgar Hoover, then in charge of the Justice Department’s General Intelligence Division. Many were tortured. Five hundred fifty were deported.

Palmer’s clampdown accomplished nothing. On September 16, 1920, a bomb attributed to anarchists went off on Wall Street, killing 38 people and wounding over 400.

Crazy…like a fox.

During the 1960s and 1970s the CIA–in violation of its charter, which limits the agency to acting overseas–cooperated with local police departments across the country to compile a list of 300,000 Americans and organizations suspected of opposing the Vietnam War.

On April 6, 1984, President Ronald Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive No. 52. Reagan targeted 400,000 people for arrest and confinement at concentration camps in mothballed Army bases. The National Security Council’s “secret government within a government,” as Congressional investigators later described it, planned to cancel the 1984 presidential election so Reagan could remain in office indefinitely.

“Lt. Col. Oliver North, for example, helped draw up a controversial plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad,” The Miami Herald reported on July 5, 1987.

People who hate The People never sleep. In 2006 Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which overturns the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibited the use of combat troops on the soil of the United States. For the first time in 128 years, the president can declare martial law in case of a hurricane, riot or terrorist attack. In May 2007 Bush attached a National Security Presidential and Homeland Directive to the National Defense Authorization Act. In case of a “national emergency”–the president could declare it without consulting anyone–he could suspend the Constitution and appoint an unelected provisional government under a “national continuity coordinator.”

To an optimist, America’s brushes with fascism seem like comforting evidence that the system works. Despite it all, even taking into account grotesqueries such as the concentration camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II, the First Amendment remains in force. Few Americans feel threatened by government tyranny. Few worry about getting shot by trigger-happy soldiers or being detained in concentration camps (unless they’re flood victims in New Orleans).

So why does a democracy need fascist schemes like Reagan’s Rex-84 Alpha Explan (a FEMA plan to put American protesters against a planned war against Nicaragua into camps)? Because American democracy is an iron fist in a velvet glove, a glove that’s becoming increasingly transparent.

Threats of repression are rarely carried out. They don’t need to be.
If potential opponents are afraid, there’s little need for concentration camps. The threat of repression (and actual crackdowns, explained away as exceptional excesses and brushed off with a token apology) creates a chilling effect on people who might pick up a rock instead of a sign.

A dog doesn’t have to bite everyone every day to earn a fearsome reputation. Mount cameras all over the place, and you don’t need to have anyone actually watching on the other side.

In a country whose legal framework authorizes the government to kidnap, torture and murder them, opponents of U.S. policy must decide whether getting out of line–anything from a letter to the editor to direct action–is worth the risk of getting kidnapped, tortured and murdered.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

has been touted as an image enhancer. I really, really don’t understand Republicans.

First up, Huck. Let’s see – polls are all over the place; Mitt is lying; Mitt was a bad governor; Republicanism is indefensible in real life; Huck will bomb Pakistan as soon as a target is fixed (!); Huck was “prophetic” for talking about Pakistan in September (eek! all the way back then?!?!?); Huck is a bridge builder; Mitt is running a desperate and dishonest campaign, McCain is not; Huck stands by everything he ever said, although he would like to “clarify” some things; Huck is ok with atheists (ok, that was unexpected); Huck links homosexuality, pedophilia, necrophilia and sadomasochism (ok, that one was not unexpected); abortion is murder, but you wouldn’t punish the mother because she is a victim (?).

Ok, one surprise, but on a claim, not a deed.

Now, the big O. O gets big crowds; O expects a tight race; (side note – Timmeh points out that without a big turnout, O could be in trouble. That’s right up there with football analysts who recommend outscoring the other team in order to win. Just.Fucking.Brilliant.); people are looking for change; O declines to name Bhutto’s killer (for all the right reasons); he also clears Hillary in the case, despite Timmeh pressing; voting against O is a bigger gamble than voting for him; O has been sniffed, prodded and poked; O is ready to lead and change how government works; O won’t mandate insurance enrollment, Edwards and Clinton will (none of them get rid of the insurance companies – the only good solution IMHO), O focuses on affordability; O is “not that far away from normal” (very recently lived an ordinary life).

No surprises, just a reminder of how likable and inspiring the Big O can be. He isn’t perfect, but if he gets the nomination I will enthusiastically support him.

Fawkes News

Nothing says “We’re Rudy!’s network and we don’t care about Iowa” quite like putting Fred! on for the first quarter of the show. Then the next quarter of the show predicting the caucuses.

Now it’s time to bash Huck with the panel, and I’m pretty sure that Huck didn’t say that Pakistanis were “scurrying over the border”. ew.

Time to get back to Rudy!, who Wallace says is in the lead nationally. Ummmmm…. a three-way tie with nobody above 20% isn’t a lead. But let’s continue…

Kristol seems worried that Daddy Warbucks won’t do well if he isn’t competitive in the first several states (as seems likely), says Huck can win if he makes it about likability, McCain wins a commander-in-chief election, and Romney has the resources to win if it becomes a race to the gutter. Ouch. Kristol appears to be in pain, and joins in the Romney-bashing with gusto.

Time to chat about the Dems. Juan Williams makes the most sense, as always, and Kristol can’t hide his sneer, especially when talking about Hillary. Yap.Yap.Yap. Mail. Hummer commercial, Rudy! commercial (Rudy invokes the Greatest Generation and 9/11, follows with threats to enemies – a new strategy!), and we’re out!

This Weak

First up? Hillary. Oh NO! Peggy Noonan says to not vote for Hillary because the right has spent almost 20 years demonizing her. That’s great logic! If you’re a right-wing drooler. I’m not saying that there aren’t reasons to vote against her, but the fact that she’s “polarizing” ain’t one of them. George S goes after her for reports that she didn’t have a security clearance and didn’t get PDBs, and therefor isn’t experienced at all.

Clinton handles questions on Rwanda, Bhutto and Musharraf very well, comes off as presidential. She talks about experience and Obama, focusing on herself and her husband. She’s still not my first choice, but is someone I can enthusiastically support, given who her opposition will be. I get all emotional with the realization that nobody on the D side is running to be torturer-in-chief.

Hillary calls for public financing of elections. I love her a little more for that! She downplays expectations, says she’s working as hard as she can and ducks out. Nicely done.

Now, The Straight-Out-The-Ass Talk Express, beginning with the latest Romney attack ad, and McCain’s response commercial. Jeebuz I have a low tolerance for Johnny Mac, and he’s not going to win anything, so as much fun as it is watching him call someone else mean-spirited, it’s on to the panel.

Ugh. It’s a Bhutto-off montage between the candidates. I have to admit that George Will says what I was thinking about the propriety of John Edwards calling Musharraf in the wake of the murders. (Basically, What the FUCK?) George Will, of course, is a “serious” commentator who thinks the assassination will make a difference in how we choose the next president. Yeah. Right. He really has no more feel for the electorate than David Brooks, who is also on this panel. If Donna Brazile wasn’t on it, I’d be outie. Shockingly, Brooks is only impressed by candidates who expressed support for the Bush policy for Pakistan. Didn’t see that one coming.

Lots of inside baseball on Iowa, and the fracturing of the Republican party. Will and Brooks are worried about Huck’s “economic populism”. Some talk about the Dems in Iowa and the excitement on that side, worry about Edward’s populism by Brooks and Will (I’m spotting a theme here).

A very moving In Memoriam closes the show for the year. We lose big names every year, but this year we lost real pioneers and leaders – Benazir Bhutto, Kurt Vonnegut, Luciano Pavarotti, Lady Bird Johnson, Boris Yeltsin, Eddie Robinson and 1014 service members in illegal wars as of air time. Of course we also lost Jerry Falwell, so it wasn’t all bad.

Literary Agent Shoutout

My brilliant literary agent Toni Mendez died in 2003, at the age of 94. In the industry Toni was known for her exquisite sense of style and amazing collection of French designer hats. I knew her as a friend, someone I talked to at least once a week for many years, someone who despite her age (or perhaps because of it) didn’t shock easily and understood my work better than a lot of people half her age.

It has been a long time without Toni. I still can’t believe she’s really gone.

Now it’s time to find a new literary agent. I have ideas for new books that I can continue to pitch myself, but the guidance of a smart agent is something I could really use. So…if you are an agent or you know a good one, please email me. I’m at chet@rall.com.

Thanks and Happy New Year!