[QUOTE=Liberal]
I’m sorry, but I just lack the motivation I guess. Presidential candidate says/does/implies something stupid/mean/outrageous. Leaked by opposition party hack, or dug up by journalist seeking noteriety/riches/advancement. I don’t understand why any of this is remarkable. What happens to people every four years that they completely forget the previous umpteen election cycles? I think that’s why Moto’s comment about bad people on all sides is important. Huckabee is being skewered here because he is a Republican. No one has skewered Clinton for his 1993 speech. Meanwhile, on right-leaning boards, the Democrats are being skewered. It’s just noise. There’s precious little light in politics. It’s almost like a chess game where the winner is the person who makes the next to last mistake.
[/QUOTE]
Clinton was skewered all over the place.
But you’re right, he hasn’t been skewered here for the 93 speech.
And there’s a reason for that, IMO.
Everyone knows politicians pander and waffle. The skewering comes, I think, when it’s sensed that you’re hiding a potentially dangerous belief underneath.
Clinton wouldn’t be skewered for giving a religious speech because nobody believes he’s going to act in a religiously fundamentalist way while in power where church and state separations are violated. People just don’t believe that. There’s a lot to judge a candidate by beyond their words; nobody believes Rudy G. is a devout xian no matter what he says. So it’s lip service. And everyone gets it. Wink. But it’s not “wink” I’m secretly going to attack xianity either. It’s just “wink” this is something we shouldn’t even be discussing here but we live in a time where I have to act like I give a shit about religion.
Huckabee, on the other hand, is a MINISTER. So, when he says things that are religious in his speeches, there IS a suspicion that he really means them and might bleed church into state. There is no such suspicion when Clinton talks religion.
Insofar as the OP goes, having been a xian growing up I believe Huckabee says such things but doesn’t NECESSARILY have a malevolent agenda of overtly inserting xianity into the government (though he might, I suppose; and I’m judging beyond just the words he speaks). However, that is a reasonable reading of his speech and so an argument about the actual words he spoke there is completely valid and suspicion and skewering doesn’t seem out of place.
The real problem with Huckabee and xians of THAT sort (not the Rudy G. sort or Clinton sort) is that one gets the sense from his comments and past decisions and behavior – all taken together between the AIDS comments to the furlough to the comment about why his candidacy is doing well, to the speech in the OP itself – that he bleeds religion into politics, albeit without necessarily any “evil” (“righteous” in his opinion) agenda to consciously do so.
I think it’s a bit hyperbolic to think that he’s a phantom menace of some kind but I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to worry that the RESULT of a Huckabee presidency would END UP with a lot of religion bleeding into government, consciously, purposefully, or otherwise.
My experience with such folks is that they honestly don’t know they’re bleeding one thing into the other until someone points it out because their primary mental orientation is around their religion which is the central facet of their life.
And that’s just fine for them, but in a pluralistic society it’s troubling and just because it’s a religious central facet doesn’t make it any less so; if anything, it makes it more troubling. Every other candidate has some central facet as well that people instinctively pick up on and judge them by, as is reasonable to expect they would: one gets the sense that Edwards is too polished maybe a phoney, that Clinton is too parsing maybe a triangulating manipulator, that McCain sold out his independent streak maybe now beholden, that Romney’s central tenet is the acquisition of power maybe he flip flops on important things, that Rudy G. is a little too happy with his management abilities maybe won’t focus on the civil liberties as much as we want, etc., etc., etc.
With a guy like Huckabee one just gets the sense that he will – possibly honestly, sincerely, and unbeknownst even to himself – slip religious belief into policy.
And when – in his view – the rubber meets the road and it comes time to veto something or move things in a particular direction whether its scientific stuff like stem cells, health issues like handing out condoms to prevent disease or giving out needles to drug addicts for the same reason, or any other such thing like approving grants to other countries to fight AIDS without morality caveats (as has been done), it’s all really unsettling and those of us that are agnostics would much rather a president that we can expect will look those issues square in the face and judge them on secular merits of such things as physical (not spiritual) health, etc. and a president that is a xian but obviously not fundamentalist is fine with us because we assume that he mostly puts that to the side in his “real” life the way, for example, everyone believes Clinton does no matter what he says.
One doesn’t get that sense about Huckabee.
That’s why the skewering and hollering.
