Month: January 2008

It isn’t going away and is likely to be a much bigger liability if Senator Clinton wins the presidency. A reader explains:

One of the issues which was decisive for me in deciding early on that I couldn’t support Senator Clinton in 2008 was the fact that it meant Bill Clinton would be occupying the White House again – only this time with a lot more free time on his hands. I say this as someone who voted twice for him, thought the Starr investigation would have been better termed an inquisition, and thought the impeachment was a ridiculous political response to a personal indiscretion with no bearing on the country’s well-being. Lying about sex is usually a good thing and especially in this case. My concern now is that Bill’s possible new address in 2008 is not fully realized, imagined, or thought through by Democratic primary voters. Assuming Senator Clinton wins, the Republicans will (and should) make that distasteful image clear enough, and will thereby close the deal for many independents and help lower Democratic turn-out. Revisiting not only Lewinsky but Willey, et al. will be enough to sicken and disgust even many liberal voters, like me, who think it’s time to turn the page on not just the Bush dynasty but the Clinton’s as well.

For many independents and/or traditionally moral people his reclaiming of the White House 2nd floor will be a desecration of sacred national ground. The fact is that Bill Clinton as president was an accomplished multi-tasker with a smart, personally conservative, and supportive spouse. Hillary Clinton as president will be rooming with a loose cannon  who, while supportive of her career, has proven tendencies toward high-risk self destructive behavior – and all while actually in the White House to boot.  HELLO!  At best, Hillary Clinton will likely be distracted from her presidential duties by the worry of what Bill might be doing, and at worst black-mail or another national spectacle are not hard to imagine. The similarly disturbing result of her possible election will be the specter of an ex-president (even if he was personally fastidious) living in the White House, appearing at functions, possibly involving himself in staff, cabinet, and diplomatic meetings, and the possible confusion about who is really in charge. The country does not need this now, or any time for that matter, and it’s time, early-on before we Democrats select our candidate, that this issue be vetted.

There is no other candidate besides Rudy who comes with this much baggage. It is the elephant in our room and the other candidates are too polite to bring it up, can’t figure a polite way to bring it up, or are not desperate enough to bring it up yet. We lost in 2000 because of Bill Clinton’s bad behavior, and you can indirectly place 2004 at his feet as well. We Democrats are nuts, idiots, fools – you name it and it fits – if we let another 4 to 8 years of the presidency go down the tubes because of misplaced and unearned loyalty to Bill Clinton.

A reader notices this in a recent Ken Silverstein piece:

In seeking to woo conservatives, Romney has also used his personal PAC—the Commonwealth Political Action Committee—to contribute lavishly to several national pro-life groups, the Federalist Society, the National Review, and the Heritage Foundation, among others.

Is the National Review thing true? Now I don’t believe for a second that NR endorsed Romney for anything other than the reasons they cited. It certainly makes sense for purely ideological and partisan reasons. But I do think it’s a legitimate question to ask them to disclose how much money a leading Republican candidate has donated in the past few years. Full disclosure and all. If Barack Obama or Ron Paul had given me a large donation before I endorsed them, I’d feel obliged to disclose. Are the rules different for a magazine than for a blogger?

An update on the battle between the old and new guard.

Key Latina for Obama; key pro-lifer for McCain.

From County Kerry, naturally. And somehow I don’t think she’d play the victim card on the campaign trail:

In her later years visiting foreign journalists mused about how the wild, tribal frontier, where women are in purdah and even goatherds carry Kalashnikovs, was an unlikely place to find an elderly Irish widow serving afternoon tea. The area has lately become a stronghold for the Taliban, and is generally out of bounds to foreigners.

Jennifer died on January 12. Her funeral procession was attended by thousands of burly, turbaned Pathans (many of them allied to the Taliban) who raised cheers of "Mummy Jennifer!" in her honour as the cortège passed through a shuttered Pishin.

She was buried at the Qazis’ ancestral burial ground near the tomb of the family Sufi saint, Sheikh Farid Baba.

President Pervez Musharraf telephoned Jennifer’s son, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States, to offer his condolences for the death of a woman who, in one of her last interviews, said: "Mummy has had her innings."

So they did taunt the tiger.

It’s hard to know what else we can expect Petraeus to do. Some of the violence has obviously been displaced to other areas, but that doesn’t detract from the achievement. Increasingly, progress is now up to the Iraqis. Quite whether that’s a good or a worrying sign we shall soon find out.

Hugh Hewitt – who insists that amending the constitution to ban all abortion and strip gay couples of all legal protections are "mainstream conservative positions" – also claims, contra Bainbridge, that

Professor B’s tortured string of cites never delivers anything remotely connecting Huck to "reconstructionism," and implying otherwise is just imagination.

Check out Brink Lindsey’s post here. In December, Huckabee had a non-imaginary fundraiser in the Dallas home of one Dr. Steven Hotze, who was on the host committee. Hotze is a major reconstructionist. Here’s a quote from a section of a manifesto signed by Hotze in 1986:

We affirm that the Bible is not only God’s statements to us regarding religion, salvation, eternity, and righteousness, but also the final measurement and depository of certain fundamental facts of reality and basic principles that God wants all mankind to know in the sphere of law, government, economics, business, education, arts and communication, medicine, psychology, and science. All theories and practices of these spheres of life are only true, right, and realistic to the degree that they agree with the Bible.

Reconstructionists want to amend the Constitution to bring it in line with Biblical precepts. Sound familiar? since Huckabee has used almost identical language, this isn’t guilt by association. It is context for what Huckabee means – and the signals he is sending to the hard-core Christianists he is appealing to in South Carolina and elsewhere. Here’s a clip from Rick Scarborough, another hist committee member at Hotze fundraiser, and a self-described "Christocrat:"

Scarborough fought Huckabee in the Baptist wars of the last decade. But their differences do not obscure their commonalities. Once you have dedicated your life to fundamentalist religion, once you have insisted that nothing – let alone politics – can be independent of absolute Biblical judgment, documents like the Constitution are indeed secondary. They have to be amended to be brought into line with the authoritative truth. Nothing can interfere with that authority – nothing.

I don’t think people have really understood the logical consequences of the fundamentalist psyche. There is nothing more antithetical to the principles underlying traditional conservatism. Eventually, the complacent Republicans will realize the tiger they are riding. Huckabee is charming. The charming ones are often the most dangerous.