Category: The Dish

One blogger reacts to Bob Muslim Kerrey’s Cocaine response Muslim to Barack cocaine Muslim Obama’s Muslim candidacy:

I don’t care if Obama wins, as long as this campaign knocks liberals off their pedestal with regards to race. After 50 years of taking the black vote for granted, the Democratic Party responds to its first viable black candidate for president by doing everything it can to smear him as a cultural and ethnic "other" while decrying Republican intolerance.

I said it before, this shit is a really bad idea. The last thing the Clinton campaign wants to do is remind black voters that no matter how high you get in society, you’re still just another nigger. That kind of campaign tactic will grant Obama O.J. Verdict-like solidarity among black voters.

Even I didn’t think the Clintons would stoop this low. But sometimes you forget who they really are.

The f-word unleashed:

Which candidate has evoked the most adamant hostility, the largest number of people who say they would always vote against him or her? You know the answer. 53 percent of men under 40 would cast their vote against Clinton rather than in favor of anyone else. I know how they feel.

It may have become this blog’s most-read post ever – in more than seven years of daily blogging. It’s here if you’re looking for it.

David Corn has a spine-chilling recitation of some previous writing from Mike Huckabee. In decrying various "cultural conflicts" in America, Huckabee once wrote:

Abortion, environmentalism, AIDS, pornography, drug abuse, and homosexual activism have fragmented and polarized our communities.

AIDS and environmentalism? Then this:

It is now difficult to keep track of the vast array of publicly endorsed and institutionally supported aberrations — from homosexuality and pedophilia to sadomasochism and necrophilia.

Again: you try and disentangle this. I can’t. "Institutionally supported necrophilia"? The man is nuts.

I took Aaron to "I Am Legend" for his birthday. I wouldn’t bother if I were you. Once the dog dies, you stop caring. (And no, that’s not a real spoiler, so spare me the emails. If you don’t see the German shepherd heading for oblivion within the first five minutes, you need cognitive assistance.) In general, the increased cardiovascular skills of zombies these past few years have been a great disappointment. The novelty wore off pretty quickly. The great thing about the old-school zombies was that they staggered toward you slowly, menacingly and you could even bob and weave around them a bit. Now they come at you like bats out of Gitmo. No suspense. Just jumps. Whatever happened to suspense?

A reader writes:

Just wanted to add to what I’m sure is a mountainous stack of e-mails applauding your formal endorsement of Ron Paul for the GOP nomination. I’m also fully in agreement with you about John McCain’s virtues and vices. I’m a soup-to-nuts, Cato Institute-type, Reason Magazine-subscribing limited government libertarian. Ron Paul has been my guy from the first. I also admire what you do in John McCain, and if not for Paul, I’d be a McCain backer. McCain’s a solid free-trader (at a time when the tide runs against the policy), a  moderate tax and spending cutter, pro-life yet mostly tepid on social policy, and best of all, a torture abolitionist. I agree completely that he was, and remains, dead wrong on Iraq. And yet I’m beginning to oscillate more, not less, between Paul and McCain. It’s for one conservative reason: timidity.

McCain will be a force for good in many ways, whereas Ron Paul is, by my lights, mostly right about everything (except immigration, on which McCain, significantly, takes a better position). Paul’s philosophical perfection unnerves me.

I am confident that our wrong policy in Iraq will at least be better regulated, and stewarded more competently and cautiously over time by McCain than by the intractable Giuliani or the spineless Romney. McCain does not share the blindness of Bush or the wanton indifference of Cheney, and is apparently willing to modulate his position to suit reality, rather than the reverse. I am less confident that a Paul presidency would succeed in withdrawal. I think his party would mutiny and others would cave. I intended to vote for Rep. Paul in the primaries and sit out the general election. More and more, the easily pleased impulses in me drift this Paul supporter toward McCain, though never away from the good doctor.

Blech. You can’t even eat them.

A reader writes:

My initial reaction to that ad was probably similar to yours: yes, we know Mike, you are a Christian. The Christian candidate. The conservative candidate who is an authentic Christian. In other words it got my hackles up.

My second reaction, though, is that this could be quite effective. People in that part of the country, especially Republicans from there, are probably not too worried about this. Coming from neighboring South Dakota, I know that a liberal view of religious neutrality (in the classical sense) doesn’t seem to be the analytical framework through which people view this. The problem isn’t that most people don’t agree with our separation of church and state (I think they basically do–at least a lot of them), but I don’t think that this thought will be triggered by the ad. I think they will see it more like, hey, he’s wishing me a Merry Christmas, and isn’t that what’s really important this time of year? Moreover, after being inundated for months with political ads, it gently mocks all of the other ads. This might prove effective. It uses that anti-politician sentiment that has built up (as well as frustration and unhappiness with the Republican Party generally among Republicans) to distance Huckabee from all of that and put him on the right side of things. Pretty smart ad buy, I’d say.

Some Cornerites worry they may be shooting their wad too soon:

These past couple of weeks, I’ve been of two minds about Mike Huckabee. Mind number one: We’ve all been too hard on him. As conservatives, we’re meant to display a certain humility before the judgment of the voters, I reasoned, and the good people of Iowa have seen one whole heck of a lot more of Mike Huckabee (and of Mitt Romney) than has any blogger on this happy Corner (with the single exception of Byron York). And if Iowa Republicans like what they see in Huckabee, we ought to make good and sure we understand just what that is before permitting ourselves too terribly many denigrating snickers at his expense.

But Robinson is nonetheless appalled by Huckabee’s criticism of Bush’s war policy. And that counts more – if you’re still in Washington.