The Dish

Polling confirms my hunch as to who won last night. A reader nails it:

He’s so slick, he’s a Christianist Clinton.

"Be careful, be very careful… Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim… Since it is politically expedient to be a Christian when you are seeking political office in the United States, Obama joined the United Church of Christ to help purge any notion that he is still a Muslim," – an anonymous email doing the rounds.

It was immensely entertaining and revealing – another coup for CNN and YouTube. Anderson was great. I live-blogged. Here’s my bottom line: Huckabee scored. Here’s my take on the classic Romney-Giuliani "sanctuary mansion" spat; and the McCain-Romney smackdown on waterboarding. McCain won my support on the torture question alone. It is, to my mind, the deepest moral issue this country is now refusing to face. And McCain faced it – eloquently, passionately, and courageously, given the state of today’s GOP. I hope he surges; but Huckabee now seems hard to stop in Iowa – and in the South. The GOP deserves him. He’s who they now are.

And the question that’s more important than any other:

A reader writes:

The only problem, Andrew, is, whatever the metaphor, he is empirically right. It’s straight up science.  And I say that as an oil geologist who makes his living producing fossil fuel.

The species collapse related to global climate change, and associated energy production, is absolutely frightening.

Coal is "stored" in the earth, and without man mining it, it would only slowly be released and more is stored. A mass balance. We are dumping tens of millions of years of that "stored" coal into the atmosphere every decade. Obliterating the coal budget through time, in no time. It is tremendously dirty stuff, full of sulfur, nitrogen, radioactive and so on compounds. The reason people shouldn’t eat fish because of Hg, which is a global epidemic of "too high to eat", is almost solely due to coal burning, it comes FROM the coal. Hg is a incredible neuro-toxin during embryonic stages for almost all life. We’re watching these Hg level reach levels where they are fundamentally changing the ability of young to grow.

I’m not a fiscal liberal, or a supporter of the death penalty, or someone who believes that a candidacy for the presidency of the United States should be based on someone’s religious faith. So Huckabee is not for me. But he is easily the most appealing candidate for the current big-spending, evangelical, Southern Republican party. I don’t find his religious schtick in any way appealing. It’s glib in one area where glibness really is inappropriate. To say something like

"Jesus was far too smart to seek public office"

may have a superficial appeal, but it is also a cheapening of Jesus’ radical injunction to forswear worldly power and wealth. To use such a cheap line to score a laugh in a political debate is not something I find particularly admirable.

But among the crowd on stage, Huckabee seemed by far the most congenial candidate. Paul is much clearer; McCain soared tonight, in my view. I think McCain’s experience, independent streak, fiscal responsibility, moral core, and national security mastery make him easily the best viable candidate on stage. Yes, I am immensely proud of Ron Paul. And after Iraq, I find his non-interventionism far more credible than McCain’s full neocon jacket. But experience does count; and McCain is in a class of his own in wartime.

Nonetheless, it’s clear that today’s Dixie-based, pro-torture, anti-immigrant GOP will find it very hard to accept the bipartisan, anti-torture supporter of comprehensive immigration reform as its candidate. Romney really is a tool. Giuliani is just too urban for the party Rove has built. So you can see why Huckabee is rising. I bet he’s on a roll now. As "Richelieu" puts it, he does have the most important qualification of anyone on stage:

A degree in Bible Studies from Ouachita Baptist University of Arkadelphia, Arkansas.

Think of tonight as Rove’s Frankenstein moment.

(Photo: Stephanie Kuykendal/Getty.)

Hunter basically said that the military is a Judeo-Christian institution and therefore should keep gay service-members permanently under threat of being fired. At least Hunter is principled: when you are part of a religiously-based organization, the GOP, and believe that religion should define public institutions, including the military, of course, there needs to be an enforcement of religious moral norms in public service. McCain ducked the question, shamefully. What does it mean to say that the policy is "working"? Unless he unpacks that, his answer is all but meaningless. Romney’s response was, unlike McCain’s and Hunter’s, contemptible. The idea that a war makes a policy of throwing out soldiers more important, rather than less, is nuts. Has he ever heard of a stop-loss order? Tonight, the fathomless cynicism and hollow ambition of this man really penetrated. If this was a contest between Romney and Giuliani, Giuliani won in the end.

It’s a defining issue and this was a defining moment. Romney’s pathetic and despicable inability to say that he opposes waterboarding and that waterboarding is torture disqualifies him from the presidency, in my view. If we are going to recover from the profound moral disgrace of the Bush-Cheney torture regime, McCain and Paul are the only Republican candidates who should be considered for the job. I just wish McCain had taken on Giuliani as well. But God bless him. And God bless him for insisting that those who refuse to disown torture should actively support withdrawal from the Geneva Conventions. It’s the only honest position to take. I saw the man defeated by Cheney and Addington in 2006 come back to fight again. God bless him.

With the Biblical literalist question, you see what Bush and Rove have achieved: the suspension of secular politics in the Republican party, and, by inference, the country as a whole. This has become, thanks to Bush and Rove, a religious contest. And that’s why, in today’s GOP, Huckabee is the proper leader. It’s a church; and he’s a minister. It’s a match made in heaven.