Since when are my grades at university public record? Someone needs my signed authorization to get my transcripts.
Slippery slope! Please return to the nearest Second Amendment thread.
To answer your question, no, it leads to a sequence of unrelated ad hoc judgments by activists, politicians, and the body politic.
I’m familiar with the Law of Unintended Consequences, but when someone makes an argument for downstream consequences too vague and amorphous and fog-like to argue against, IMHO it’s time to call bullshit. So I call bullshit.
Well, no. But if activists on the left are inspired to keep asking Huck for his sermons, and are able to keep the issue in the public eye, then Huck has to decide if his refusal to let his sermons see the light of day is causing him more credibility problems with moderate voters than his making them available would.
There are occasionally large areas of overlap between the median voter and us lefty rabble.
That’s true, except that it isn’t. We know that Kerry’s grades were available from the Navy due to his commission, but we don’t know that Huckabee saved any of his sermons, or even wrote them down for that matter. I’ve seen preachers just ad lib, using nothing but a Bible.
It’s a shame that their beliefs matter so little to them. They say they’re so important.
Except, of course, that it isn’t vague and amorphous at all. I have noted several circumstances where this is proceeding - medical, military, grade records. Individually, these might be small intrusions. Collectively, they are large.
Now, it is certainly your right to argue that this isn’t as big of a problem as I believe it is becoming. Certainly it wouldn’t be the first time we have disagreed. But let’s agree that I haven’t been vague at all - I have been very specific. I have pointed out numerous examples of this kind of intrusion, and it certainly points to a pattern for me. I think most other people here would agree with that, even if they quibbled about how big that problem is.
“Render unto Caesar…” and all that. 
It would be a mistake, IMHO, to assume fundamentalist or evangelical voters are so unsophisticated that they cannot ever separate what is good for the country from a narrow theological focus. That certainly hasn’t been their pattern, especially among evangelicals, where a far greater proportion of their vote is in flux.
Yeah, you’re right: they’ve had the sophistication to be able to separate Jesus’ admonition to love our enemies from our government’s willingness to torture them, when it comes time to express their political opinions.
But I digress.
Sorry, different slope. I refer you to post 126.
Are you contentious just for the fun of it or something? You bitch if they do and bitch if they don’t.
Oooh, just a couple days into the new year, and the communal bill to fix busted irony meters is already mounting…
Yes, I can imagine how much you must have dreaded the chore of your much needed intervention.
Could be. But I think it’s close enough for government work.
I looked at it, and yes, for the most part that is true. So consider that point ceded. But I’m holding the line at “and such.” “And such” is definitely private!
But wouldn’t you consider college transcripts and military records as official records? Sermons are not official records, but more of a conversation with his congregation. I’ve known quite a few pastors and I’ve never known one who wrote the whole thing down–it was usually notes in an outline form. I seriously doubt that any of that was kept, or what good it would be to anyone if it was.
I’m more interested in what he has to say now, rather than what he may have said to his Arkansas congregation 20 years ago. I want the media to ask him hard questions and keep his feet to the fire. I want the other candidates to honestly debate him on the issues and what he’s suggesting as a solution to our problems. I am really really tired of hearing nothing but what amounts to idle gossip about what someone did or didn’t do 20 years before they ever thought of running for office. Why do I care about lost sermons when the guy is right here in front of me today? People are capable of changing, growing, evolving–I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on the past. I want to see him have to answer the Big Questions today…and I don’t think he can do that. But if we keep endlessly fussing about the Lost Sermons, then that becomes the story instead.
Yeah, but so is a 6,000-year-old earth. 
It seems appropriate to bump this thread, in view of the debate over Jeremiah Wright’s sermons and how they should affect our view of Barack Obama.
It seems clear that if the sermons given by the candidate himself shouldn’t be something of interest to voters in deciding whether to vote for the candidate (which is what many posters were arguing in this thread), it’s hard to see why the sermons given by the candidate’s minister should be germane.
But there’s no arguing with the reality that they are being treated as germane, by Obama’s detractors and defenders alike. So it’s hard for me to see how Huckabee’s sermons could be regarded as not being a significant datum for voters to consider in judging the man.
It isn’t fair, sure. The press corps only goes after people they personally like if they get *seriously * worried about how they’d fuck the country up (they never got to that point with Bush). Then comes a flurry of make-up stories that paint the candidate just as negatively as the previous stories did positively - Obama may be in that compensatory phase now, perhaps thanks mainly to the SNL sketch.
Huckabee does seem like a very personable fellow in public, and no doubt he is in private too. Bush may not have played games with Jon Stewart, but he did give them all backslaps and frat-house nicknames, and that worked. McCain gives them interviews and barbecues and that works too. But let him have one or two more blowups with Members of the Club and you’ll start to see stories about his temperament and suitability for the top office.
By contrast, Huckabee was never seriously regarded as a possible actual nominee who needed to be scrutinized all that closely. If he had ever come to that point, then I think you would have seen the jaundiced scrutiny you’re seeing now of Obama’s views.
Are you seriously saying that the press is currently more worried about Obama than they ever were about Bush?
Yes, I do think so. I do believe the DC press corps is a permanent part of the power structure there, a conscious participant in the game rather than the neutral observers they sometimes remember they should be. I do not think they as a group realized, any more than most of us did, how disastrous Bush would be as a President, since after all he did campaign on that “uniter not a divider” crap that his personal conduct did seem to back up. But they obviously never liked Gore any more than they liked the smart kid in class who always did his homework, and were quite gleeful about repeating distortions and outright lies about him. They similarly went after Clinton for his unforgivable sin of going around them and right to the people on major issues, and for the people’s unforgivable habit of continuing to give him their support while they tried to drive him out.
The Beltway Bubble press corps never got that wake-up slap in 2000 that they’ve had this time, not after all those years of the Get Clinton For Something Campaign made it impossible for Gore to be treated any more respectfully either.
Now you’re going to ask me if late-night comedy-show writers are participants in the game, right? Well, yes, I think they are.