Giving Honor, and far less important subjects
HONOR IS DUE
Today we honor those that have served our nation in the military. There is no higher form of service and no greater level of sacrifice than to knowingly put one’s life into harm’s way in defense of this country. To such people we owe a debt that can never be repaid.
A simple “THANK YOU” seems insufficient but it is all we have to offer. It is offered with the deepest sincerity possible.
QOTD – Is Huckabee Running?
We have made well known here our opinion that Sarah Palin is not going to run – she lacks the organization; she does not have what is called in the political biz “a camp.” She has fans, but that does not a campaign make.
Over the weekend, similar questions began to swirl around Mike Huckabee. We first heard them, in private, related to his obvious weight gain. But then it got serious in the press. Tuesday’s WSJ Political Diary (subscription required) had this to say:
The latest Gallup poll shows Mike Huckabee as the Republican frontrunner for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, but he sure isn’t acting like it.
The poll found that 71% of Republicans say they would seriously consider voting for Mr. Huckabee, while 65% said the same about Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin. That might sound worth celebrating, but Mr. Huckabee was apparently too busy seething yesterday in an interview with Politico.com about how his two potential opponents are overshadowing him.
Sarah Palin kicks off a book tour next week for her memoir “Going Rogue.” The tour’s already attracted obsessive media coverage, leaving little of the spotlight for Mr. Huckabee’s “A Simple Christmas,” which he has been promoting in a trip to 22 states. Griped Mr. Huckabee: “Some of the people who had excoriated me and really been very dismissive of me for views that I had taken, and labeled me anything from a populist to an ignoramus — the same people have been very defensive [of] and laudatory to Sarah Palin. . . . I’m glad she’s getting the props — I know I’m not nearly as attractive.”
Then there’s Mitt Romney, whom some GOP opinion leaders and pundits already are calling the Republicans’ best shot at beating President Obama if the economy remains depressed in 2012. But Mr. Huckabee likened Mr. Romney to “the Kristen Wiig character on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” who is constantly making implausible claims for herself to upstage everyone around her.
Apparently Mr. Huckabee’s meeting with Club for Growth President Pat Toomey in the spring didn’t help assuage his bad feelings toward Mr. Romney and the so-called Wall Street gang either. “[The meeting] wasn’t very productive. I realized then that these guys are just what I thought they were — they’re pay for play, and they do it anonymously on behalf of people who don’t want to be known as the funders of these hit operations. I find that repulsive,” said Mr. Huckabee about the Club for Growth.
Everybody needs a role model. Mr. Huckabee’s seems to be the ever-resentful Richard Nixon.
And Allahpundit at Hot Air looks at the same comments and concludes:
Given that fiscal conservatives are the people Huck will have to win over to beat Romney, TNR calls this knock on CfG “the functional equivalent of Mitt Romney trashing evangelicals.” Exit question: Is Huck running or not?
So, far be it from us not to hop on this bus. Huckabee will run. But, as last time, it will not be a genuine effort. Last time, Huckabee lacked a serious organization, and he pulled any number of stunts that were “un-presidential” to say the least. Who can forget his famous, “I’m not going to do what I am about to do to show you I can do it,” press conference? Huckabee needs the appearance of candidacy for credibility, and he garnered way too much free publicity last time to not take a shot at it again.
The real exit question is: Will people take him seriously enough this time, as they did last time, to affect the outcome of the primaries?
Catholics In The Cross Hairs
FoxNews reports on efforts by Catholic Bishops to get abortion funding out of the health care bill. They do so because Representative Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) [ed note: as a CA resident all I can say is *SIGH*} early in the day threatened the tax exempt status of the Roman Catholic Church and generally went on petulant anti-religious tirade quite reminiscent, absent the violence, of the petulance witnessed in the wake of the passage of Prop 8. At The Corner John J. Pitney pointed out:
Of course, Representative Woolsey is not the first Democrat
to object to legislative advocacy by the clergy. Here is another:
It is an attempt to establish a theocracy to take charge of our politics and our legislation. It is an attempt to make the legislative power of this country subordinate to the church. It is not only to unite Church and State, but it is to put the State in subordination to the dictates of the church.
That was Senator Stephen A. Douglas (D., Ill.), on March 14, 1854. He was talking about an anti-slavery petition.
I am increasingly of the opinion that we are reaching a crisis in this nation with regards to religious influence in politics. As religious forces continue to be able to hold certain lines, the left has stopped attacking ideas and started to attack churches themselves. It’s getting personal.
We must resist the temptation to get personal back. It’s a political loser and it is not loving as our faiths would define it. Our religions can survive this assault because they take their legitimacy from other places – provided we can resist this temptation and cling to the place from which that legitimacy emanates.
An Interesting Insight Into How Politics Is Done
Ben Smith admits that it was Obama’s oppo research team that was the source of the $400 dollar haircut story in re: Edwards. He concludes:
It’s also worth noting, when the pianos start falling on Mitt Romney, that a top Obama researcher, Shauna Daly, is now the DNC’s research chief.
Indeed, worth noting.
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments » | 
Print this post
| 
Email This Post
Tweets that mention Giving Honor, and far less important subjects | Article VI Blog | John Schroeder -- Topsy.com on 11 Nov 2009 at 8:25 am #
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Deborah Austin and Mitt Romney in 2012!, Kenneth Labbe. Kenneth Labbe said: PlanetRomney #tcot ArticleVI Blog: GivingHonorandfarlessimportantsubjects: HONOR IS DUE Today we honor those that http://bit.ly/28ansO [...]
coltakashi on 11 Nov 2009 at 1:36 pm #
Apropos of “Catholics in the Crosshairs?”, a November 7 entry by Andrews Sullivan on his blog at The Atlantic (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/) called for smear campaigns against Catholics and Mormons, because of their opposition to same-sex marriage. It was titled “No More Mister Nice Gays” and said:
“A campaign that in future took on the Catholic hierarchy for its tolerance of child abuse while denying grown people marriage rights would be a promising start. Ads reminding people of the Mormon church’s long, long history of racism would also be salient. We’re new to this, and we’re learning.”
So Mr. Sullivan is urging supporters of same-sex marriage to learn religious bigotry.
Other posters can do a better job than I of defending the Catholic Church, but Mormons should not think that the old policy of withholding priesthood ordination from men of African descent makes modern Mormons “racist”, any more than America’s history of racial segregation makes modern Americans racist. As of 2009, some 300,000 Africans in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Cote d’Ivoire, and other nations are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Are they “racist”? Did they join the church because they thought it was “racist”?
How about the million Mormons in Brazil, many of whom have African ancestry? The million Mormons in Mexico? The hundreds of thousands of Mormons in Asia, from Mongolia to Japan to the Philippines? The hundreds of thousands in Polynesia, including one third of all Tongans? The leaders of all those thousands of congregations are not white Americans, but local people, all unpaid volunteers.
Sullivan seems unaware that over half of Mormons live in 150 nations outside the US, and over half of Mormons speak a language other than English, and that US Mormons, including those of European ancestry, fan out at a rate of 25,000 new ones a year to nations of all races, living among them and learning their languages and teaching them about their religious beliefs. I am sure it would be a startling thought to Mr. Sullivan to contemplate that, not only are Mormons more racially and ethnically diverse than the US, but also Mormons are collectively among the most internationally traveled and culturally aware people in the country, reflected in the international makeup of the students at BYU campuses, especially BYU-Hawaii. Would a “racist” church look like this?
Since the true picture of Mormons can be easily obtained by a visit to lds.org or mormon.org, it is clear that Mr. Sullivan feels justified in practicing willful ignorance about the objects of his prejudice. Apparently the awful example of religious bigotry run amok at Fort Hood a couple of days before, whose victims included a young Mormon soldier from Utah, did not give Mr. Sullivan any pause about his own rabble rousing.