Huckabee: The New Huey Long
The 2008 Republican presidential race has already produced two upsets: the rise of Mike Huckabee from no-hoper to a serious threat to Mitt Romney in Iowa and the spectacular fundraising success of Ron Paul, who raised over $4.2 million on Nov. 5 alone and be the top Republican fundraiser for the fourth quarters of 2007. The potential exists for a bigger surprise yet, for Ron Paul to snatch the nomination from Romney and Giuliani in the name of traditional conservatism—if a significant number of Christian conservatives see through Mike Huckabee’s flimflam.
They have already seen through former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the multimillionaire whose views on abortion and homosexuality have conveniently mutated as he has sought higher office. Romney’s defenders claim that the man who campaigned to the left of Ted Kennedy on social issues in 1994 and adhered to a similar platform in his 2002 gubernatorial race has since seen the light. If so, he couldn’t have timed his conversion better: any sooner, and he would have turned off Massachusetts voters. Any later, and he would have no prayer of getting the presidential nod. (Who needs Giuliani-lite when Giuliani himself is in the race?) National Review reporter David Freddoso has come up with a good question to put to Romney: “Have you ever changed a position on anything so that [it] doesn’t benefit your political ambitions?”
Romney had already spent $20 million seeking the nomination by mid-July, with a heavy emphasis then and since on the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. All that spending bought him only the most skin-deep support in the Hawkeye State, where all recent polls find former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee now beating him. Huckabee, who has earned himself the nickname “Tax-Hike Mike” for his terrible fiscal record in Arkansas, had raised only about $2.2 million for his entire campaign by mid-October and had a paltry $650,000 cash on hand at the beginning of that month, according to ABC News. Unlike Romney, Huckabee hasn’t bought his support, and he isn’t getting his momentum from small-government fiscal conservatives. Huckabee’s traction in Iowa, and increasingly across the nation, is thanks to the enthusiasm he receives from the Republican Party’s religious base. Analyzing a recent McClatchey-MSNBC poll that found Huckabee leading Romney in Iowa by twelve points, reporter David Lightman noted, “Huckabee’s strength rose most from self-described ‘born-again’ Christians, who are expected to deliver about 40 percent of the state’s Republican vote. They preferred Huckabee, a Baptist preacher, by 42-to-8 percent over Romney.”
Evangelicals and religious right voters of other denominations are lighter on the ground in New Hampshire, where Huckabee’s support is correspondingly thinner—he regularly polls in fourth there, behind Romney, Giuliani, and John McCain. In South Carolina, where Christian conservatives are somewhat stronger, polls again show Huckabee overtaking Romney at the head of the pack. Nationwide, Christian conservatives are a bedrock demographic of Republican primary voters, and the “God gap” among religious voters was crucial to George W. Bush’s victory in the 2004 general election. John Green, a Pew Center senior fellow in religion and American politics, provides some compelling data: Evangelical Protestants went for Bush over Kerry by 79 percent to 21 percent. Non-Latino Catholics chose Bush by 57 to 43 percent. (Bad news for Karl Rove, though: Latino Catholics preferred Kerry by a whopping 63 to 37 percent.) “Values voters,” as the Republican religious base came to be called in the last presidential cycle, might well propel Huckabee to the Republican nomination—if they turn out for the primaries, and if they start opening their wallets for the cash-starved former governor—and while they can’t elect Huckabee next November by themselves (Bush only beat Kerry in the 2004 popular vote by 51 to 48 percent, despite his huge margins among frequent churchgoers), they lend his campaign whatever general election chance it might have.
All of this alarms neoconservatives like Charles Krauthammer, who detects in Christian conservatives’ reluctance to back the chameleon-like Romney the dread specter of bias against Romney’s Mormon faith. He doesn’t deign to mention Romney’s socially left-wing gubernatorial record and past campaigns, instead asserting that the Romney trails Huckabee “because about 40 percent of the Republican caucus voters in 2000 were self-described ‘Christian conservatives’—twice the number of those in New Hampshire, for example—and, for many of them, Mormonism is a Christian heresy.” Before Mormons or anybody else rushes to embrace Krauthammer as a paragon of religious tolerance, however, one should consider whether the Washington Post columnist doesn’t think that denominational commitments of all kinds are a distraction from the one true faith: the Church of America. Says Krautie, “The God of the Founders, the God on the coinage, the God for whom Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving day is the ineffable, ecumenical, nonsectarian Providence of the American civil religion whose relation to this blessed land is without appeal to any particular testament or ritual.” (Krauthammer isn’t endorsing secularism here: he’s conscripting religious sentiment, stripped of theological content, into the service of Proposition Nationalism. But that’s a subject for another day.)
The real problem with Christian conservatives’ support for Huckabee isn’t the bogeyman of religion intolerance. Rather it’s that Huckabee is not a conservative at all. The former Arkansas governor has tried to rehabilitate his dismal record on taxes by embracing a crackpot talk-radio panacea called (in perfectly Orwellian language) the “Fair Tax.” Huckabee says he’ll abolish the income tax and IRS and institute instead the “fair tax,” which is notionally a national sales tax of 23 percent—but really, as Bruce Bartlett points out, 30 percent: “If a product costs $1 at retail, the FairTax adds 30%, for a total of $1.30. Since the 30-cent tax is 23% of $1.30, FairTax supporters say the rate is 23% rather than 30%.” Want to pay 30 percent more on everything you now buy? Then the “Fair Tax” is for you. The rate is so high because, like every fraudulent tax reform, it’s revenue neutral. For most Americans, it would be a tax hike, since sales taxes are regressive, affecting the middle class and poor more than the wealthy, while our current income tax is progressive, disproportionately hurting the rich. Progressivity is unjust, but why should a middle-income family of four in, say, Arkansas, pay more taxes so that George Soros and Howard Buffet can catch a break? Ask Tax-Hike Mike.
As for abolishing the IRS, it isn’t likely. If a Democratic Congress were even to entertain the idea of a regressive sales tax, it would probably demand that a progressive income tax be kept to share the burden, and this would be a strong political position: a lower sales tax for everyone, in exchange for keeping an income tax on a relatively few wealthy people. But of course, over time both taxes would rise—indeed, tax hikes would be easier than ever with two distinct constituencies (the rich and everybody else) competing to raise taxes on one another in order to offset their own tax cuts. Even if the IRS were downsized, the new sales tax would not be self-enforcing: there’s nothing special about the IRS; tax collectors of all kinds have been despised since antiquity—they were the most hated people among whom Christ traveled—and with good reason. Sales-tax enforcers would crack down on businesses, on individuals who might be buying from “black” (i.e. free, untaxed, unregulated) markets, and would put a great deal of scrutiny on American citizens entering or leaving the country—can’t have anyone buying lower-tax goods from Mexico or Canada or elsewhere, not if we want to be “fair.”
Why does Huckabee support revenue-neutral tax reform at all, rather than a simple tax cut? Because he’s a big spender, that’s why: Huckabee ditches conservative positions not just on government revenues, but government outlays as well. According to the Club for Growth and Americans for Tax Reform, “Governor Huckabee was responsible for a 37% higher sales tax in Arkansas, 16% higher motor fuel taxes, and 103% higher cigarette taxes,” all of which failed to offset Huckabee’s spending increases, since “Under Governor Huckabee’s watch, state spending increased a whopping 65.3% from 1996 to 2004, three times the rate of inflation. … and the state’s general obligation debt shot up by almost $1 billion.” Huckabee likes his government super-sized. He also likes it to be more intrusive into the lives of ordinary citizens: Huckabee has said that as president he would sign a federal ban on smoking in public places, and one can take it on faith that that would only be the beginning of Huckabee’s ambitions for federal management of Americans’ health and recreation activities.
One is hard pressed to find any area where Huckabee expresses a commitment prudent, limited government; which is to say, to conservative principle. He’s a NASA space cadet. In foreign policy, he’s not only an interventionist—he wants to remain in Iraq indefinitely, and he’s said he would launch an attack on Iran without so much as a congressional authorization—but he’s poorly informed and by most accounts far out of his depth discussing world affairs. He has opposed immigration enforcement and supported providing taxpayer benefits to illegal immigrants and has accused critics of his position of “race-baiting and demagoguery.” As for crime, there’s Huckabee’s very liberal use of his clemency and commutation powers as governor and his troubling relationship to the parole of rapist Wayne Dumond, who went on to murder a woman in Missouri after being released from an Arkansas prison. (I’m in favor of a little more liberalism in the penal system myself—that America has more people in prison than any other nation on earth, both in per capita and in absolute numbers, is a national disgrace. But Huckabee’s record of commuting murders’ sentences is startling even to me.)
Against all that, Huckabee is anti-abortion, opposes gay marriage, and considers homosexuality sinful. The same can’t be said with much confidence about Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney, and so far voters have found Huckabee’s folksy manner and guitar-strumming stage persona more enticing than Fred Thompson’s air of bewildered indifference (“Can I have a round of applause?”). He’s a Baptist minister as well, of course, which doesn’t hurt him with Protestant voters. But none of this makes Huckabee a conservative: there are anti-abortion, religiously conservative liberals. In Goldwater’s day, let alone Robert A. Taft’s, when social issues were less of a distinguishing feature of Republicans and Democrats, Huckabee would have belonged on the Democratic side of the aisle. Naïve, big-government, tax-and-spend liberals like Mike Huckabee have not become any more conservative simply because the Democratic Party has become the party of abortion on demand. As Phyllis Schlafly has warned, Huckabee “destroyed the conservative movement in Arkansas, and left the Republican Party a shambles. … Yet some of the same evangelicals who sold us on George W. Bush as a ‘compassionate conservative’ are now trying to sell us on Mike Huckabee.”
Fortunately, socially conservative religious voters do not have to settle for Mike Huckabee; there is an alternative to him, Romney, and Giuliani. That alternative is the other second tier candidate who has vaulted into the top echelon, Dr. Ron Paul. The Texas congressman has the fundraising that Huckabee doesn’t; in terms of the money he’s pulling in—Paul is on target to raise $12 to $15 million for the final quarter of 2007—he’s on par with Giuliani and Romney. Where Huckabee is poor on the panoply of traditional conservative issues, Paul is rock solid. Paul, in ten terms in Congress, has never once voted to raise taxes. (And he doesn’t believe in any of that “revenue neutral” hokum.) Paul has always been for border enforcement and denying illegal immigrants taxpayer benefits. And Paul was one of the very few Congressional Republicans to see the folly of the Iraq War, which he voted against, right from the beginning. Paul is steeped in the Old Right, indeed old American tradition of avoiding entanglements and unnecessary wars. Huckabee is known as Tax-Hike Mike. Ron Paul, on the other hand, is “Dr. No” for his refusal to vote for any legislation that cannot be squared with a strict reading of the Constitution.
His social conservative credentials are 24 karat as well: as an ob-gyn, he has personal experience with life in the womb that undergirds his staunch opposition to abortion. His support for a federal ban on partial-birth abortion is, to the best of my knowledge, the only instance of Paul overriding his strict commitment to states’ rights for the sake of another cause. Paul is for overturning Roe v. Wade and sending abortion law back to the states, where it constitutionally belongs. His approach to opposing gay marriage is also federalist—rather than endorsing a constitutional amendment to federalize marriage, Paul would like Congress to restrict the federal courts’ power over defining marriage, which would allow the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act to be the unchallenged law of the land. States could still redefine marriage if they chose—but courts could not impose one state’s laws on every other. It’s not the solution that every Christian conservative wants, but it is the one that does least violence to the Constitution.
Paul’s commitment to law—be it divine law, natural law, or civil constitutional law—ought to be one of his most attractive qualities for Christian conservative voters. Paul understands the idea of law as a bond and limit on human desire and activity: alone of the 2008 Republican presidential contenders Paul understands that just laws have their source in something other than human whim. Consider the difference between Ron Paul’s response and Mitt Romney’s answer when each was asked by Iowa talk radio host Jan Mickelson whether Roe is the law of the land. “It is now,” said Romney, which prompted Mickelson to tell him, “… the Supreme Court doesn’t make law. They can’t make law. There’s only three sources of law and the court’s not one of them.” Ron Paul’s answer: “Well, they call it the law of the land but I want to clarify that by getting rid of it. This is one example of the courts overstepping their bounds tremendously…” Paul then goes on to explain that here, too, a constitutional amendment is not necessary: Congress already has the power to restrict the federal courts’ jurisdiction. So why, asks Mickelson, didn’t the putatively antiabortion Republicans do that when they held the majority in Congress?
Paul: “Well I think it’s insincerity in what they say when they campaign, and they don’t follow through, and they sort of pander to get votes and then they don’t want to rock the vote.”
Mickelson: “So they come out here to the cheap seats and serve up pro-life rhetoric and go back to Washington and go back to doing their thing.”
Paul: “Get the pro-life vote and then go and not offend the people who believe in abortion, and try to ride the rail in the middle of the road, and too often they get away with it. I think I have the reputation for doing what I say, and voting that way, and my voting record shows that.”
Paul has picked up support from several influential Christian conservative writers, including Chuck Baldwin and Laurence Vance. He’s making inroads at the grassroots level as well. But so far, he hasn’t attracted the kind of mass “values voter” following that has been propelling Huckabee’s effort. If support for Huckabee is intended as a political calculation on the part of grassroots Christian conservative, it’s a mistaken one: the underfunded Huckabee might pull off an upset against Romney in Iowa, but he has little hope of beating “Rudy McRomney” for the Republican nomination—or beating Hillary or Barack next November. A tax-and-spend liberal like Huckabee has as little chance of uniting the Right as the untrustworthy Romney and socially liberal Giuliani. Paul, on the other hand, already has the support of libertarians and antiwar moderates. If the Christian grassroots voted according to conservative principle and added their weight to Paul, he would have a very good chance indeed of beating the whole New York / Massachusetts / Chicago slate of candidates in both parties.
But the 2008 contest poses serious tests for Christian conservatives: a test of whether their commitment to conservatism extends beyond social issues, and a test of whether they can resist the folksy charms of a good ol’ boy from Arkansas—many Evangelicals, after all, fell for the last Arkansas governor to run for president in 1992, which was one of the secrets of Bill Clinton’s first victory. If the grassroots don’t resist the siren call of Tax-Hike Mike, they might yet remain anti-abortion, but in every other respect they’ll have ceased to be a religious right and will have become a new, and dangerous, religious left.
Comments
“uniting the Right as the untrustworthy
Romney and socially liberal Giuliani.”
Initing the right? WE live in such a
self-serving individualistic culture today
most families are celebrating christmas
with themselves. No one wants to be united.
I have other issues with Paul. All this money
he’s raising, where is he spending it? I don’t
watch the evening news, local or national, but
someone tell me he’s buying commercial space on
the networks. No chance of winning without
getting the pensioner vote.
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Great essay,I’ll take Huey Long anyday over big Mike.It should be fun the next couple of months.Huck turns off a lot of voters,and Romney is spending half his fortune. Its a tossup who will be standing at the end. I bet on the only sane one Ron Paul.
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Dan,
Have you thought of looking at Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter? Or would that interfere with your strawman argument of false conservatives vs Ron Paul?
PS. What do you think of Ron Paul channeling the Ralph Neas with his comments about Fascism comming to America in a flag and cross?
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Great article, Mr. McCarthy.
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‘Have you thought of looking at Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter?’
‘I would authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons if there was no other way to preempt those particular centrifuges [in Iran].’- Duncan Hunter, Oct 9, 2007.
As for Tancredo, we all know about his advocacy of nuking Mecca and Medina.
The only way you could support these two is if you are an ardent warmonger.
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There is a geat article on the Catholic Church and the Pope at Lew Rockwell’s site.Huckabee has stated he would support Giuliani but not Ron Paul and we all know about Pat Robertson and John Hagee.The evangelicals are the last bastian of support for the racist state of Israel and this immoral war.They sacrifice their children to this war. They are a heresy that has to be confronted.Ron Paul is the closest thing we have to a reaL Catholic running.He uses the Catholic doctrines of subsidiery and just war all the time and this from a protestant,
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Daniel,
Good article. I don’t think that many people here actually support Huckabee. I don’t see anyone rushing out to vote for him in a primary over Paul. The problem that many people have, I believe, is the neoconservative criticism of Huckabee’s invoking of religion. Calling Huckabee a “fascist” for invoking Christmas is a move straight from the Cultural Marxist bogeyman playbook. (Not that you are doing that, you are not, but I’ve seen others here say such things.)
A Huckabee presidency probably would resemble GW’s “compassionate conservatism.” Like many a Jacobin, he has utilized “universal human rights” and “civil rights” to criticize real conservatives, especially regarding immigration.
More recently, I will give Huckabee credit in that he’s come around on immigration, or at least is giving lip service to attrition and reduction, and his criticism of free trade too is welcome. At times he recently has sounded like Buchanan, although I don’t know how sincere this “conversion” is. I’m certainly not going to change my primary vote from Paul to Huckabee because of it.
Ron,
There are good things about Hunter and Tancredo. Both have helped to make free trade and immigration major issues. Although at this point I’m voting for Paul, under other circumstances, I wouldn’t rule out voting for Hunter or Tancredo. Although I disagree with them on the war, I think that free trade and immigration are such important issues that I’d still support them. In many ways, immigration is the greatest issue of our day. Iraq will come and go. But if the U.S. is converted into a Third World country, we are in trouble.
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Question:
Why are you people so hung up on immigration?
Does the sight of brown skinned Mexicans scare you so?
What pitiful lives you must all live…
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‘Although at this point I’m voting for Paul, under other circumstances, I wouldn’t rule out voting for Hunter or Tancredo. Although I disagree with them on the war, I think that free trade and immigration are such important issues that I’d still support them. In many ways, immigration is the greatest issue of our day. Iraq will come and go. But if the U.S. is converted into a Third World country, we are in trouble.’
Don’t worry. Given Tancredo and Hunters’ views on foreign policy, they would have every 3rd world state nuked.
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The rise of the Huckster is a probably a good thing for Ron Paul. At one debate they asked the candidates whether they welcomed Fred Thompson to the race, and for his part Rep. Paul said yes because it split up the pro-war vote more. If Paul can win, it will have to be with a plurality because most Republican voters, even if they now question the wisdom of the war, would like to think it was a noble effort.
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This is a brilliantly written article, as I would
expect Dan to produce on this subject. The mention of
Tancredo and Hunter as alternatives to RP by Mr.
Lewenberg is interesting, and if truth be known,I
supported Tancredo before RP got into the race--and
before it became apparent that there’s not a dime’s
worth of difference between Tancredo-Hunter and Joe
Lieberman on foreign policy. I’m afraid that if either T or H
started going up in the polls and became a promising
candidate, he would also begin sounding like a neocon
about America’s mission to the world. Furthermore,
unlike these other candidates, RP has the merit of
wishing to apply a meat cleaver to the federal
bureaucracy. He wishes to practice on American public
administration the destructive revolution that michael
ledeen exhorts us to carry out everywhere else.
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While I would not rule out some traces of xenophobia, there are also legitimate concerns with respect to illegal immigration. Of the many issues floating around, illegal immigration has to be the thorniest (meaning the most complex and difficult to address). Living in Gulf Coast Texas, I have little concern over the “cultural” threat, but there does seem to be a correlation between illegal immigartion adn increased incidence of crime, it seems very plausible that it deflates wages, and it certainly appears that illegal immigrants are exploited. How to solve the issue is far more difficult.
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My Evangelical friends I tell that what’s missing is their equivalent to Catholic Social Teaching (includng just war). Thus Huckabee, who needs to be understood from his religious background.
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An excellent essay, illuminating the weaknesses of Huckabee and Romney and highlighting the strengths of Ron Paul. If only Ron Paul’s campaign were as adroit as Daniel McCarthy.
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Bede, as usual, is a voice of wisdom in the comments.
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<<there does seem to be a correlation between illegal immigartion adn increased incidence of crime>>
I went around and around with Dr Cathay about this…
Let us look at the crime rate of Brownsville, TX:
http://www.disastercenter.com/texas/crime/12792.htm
The murder rate in Brownsville in 1980 was 14.3. In 2005 that rate was 2.4.
The burglary rate in 1980 was 2,402.7. In 2005 it had dropped to 754.2.
These numbers are mirrored throughout America in all communities that have had an increase of Hispanics.
To claim that Hispanics increase crime is just not true. I believe, if anything, we should be truthful with one another.
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Dan is very insightful as always, though the comparison to Huey Long makes me cringe - Long’s economic program was essentially Georgist and he was certainly no man of the religious left, indeed, the Sinclair Lewis quote about fascism coming wrapped in the American flag is often attributed to Long.
I agree with those commenters who say that whatever their opinion of Huckabee he’s getting the Goldwater treatment, and as with Goldwater, time will tell just how much of it is deserved.
On the one hand Huckabee certainly has the potential to convert the Republican Party to the religious left, perhaps without intending to, just as Goldwater, perhaps without intending to, converted the Republican Party to undistilled Burnhamism in his day. Indeed, I myself have said that I forsee the Republican Party being replaced by the Spitzer-Huckabee party.
But on the other hand, I can still concieve of Huckabee many years down the line looking back, like Goldwater, with some horror at what he wrought. Dan’s piece here, which is certainly excellent, may or may not be looked back on like Rothbard’s equally insightful vituperation against Goldwater, or even still, that of Felix Morley, which, as described and quoted approvingly in Rothbard’s Betrayal Of The American Right, came awfully close to Martin Luther King’s infamous line on Goldwater about “tendencies of Hitlerism”.
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Immigration matters because it causes genetic replacement, not a mixture.
“We investigated various cases of the island model with stochastic migration. If the population is infinite, the immigrants have a fixed gene frequency and the alleles are neutral, the gene frequency on the island converges to that of the immigrants.”
Genetics. 1979 January; 91(1): 163–176.
The Island Model with Stochastic Migration
Thomas Nagylaki
Department of Biophysics and Theoretical Biology, The University of Chicago
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I think Huey Long is getting a bad rap here. The stepfather of one of my best friends was a boyhood playmate of Huey’s. As he told my friend, “Before Huey became governor, I had to work on the roads for two weeks a year under the old corvee system. After he took over, we were freed from that.” Before Long, Louisiana was a banana republic where 2% of the population kept the rest as serfs. Not surprisingly, this is the goal that the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street have for us now. Long’s downfall was that he was a better demagogue than FDR. This led to his assassination. If Mr. McCarthy is going to smear Huey Long with an unsupported relationship with Huckabee, at least he could support the comparison with some evidence.
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I have a little insight on how to solve the
immiration issue. It’s only an issue because
it’s not a problem.
When the Down Jones drops to 3100, which is
where it was in 1981, and the yearly income for
a family drops to $10,000, americans will run to
the cotton fields to work.
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Why are you people so hung up on immigration?
Because illegal immigration is killing the schools, hospitals and the quality of life. Americans in the southwest United States should not have to live in third world conditions because they live next door to mexico.
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I’d like to thank everyone for their comments. Regarding the Huey Long reference in the headline, headlines are an editor’s prerogative rather than a writer’s. Having worked as an editor myself, I’m happy to defer to whatever the editor decides to call a piece (within reason); that’s the chain of command and responsibility.
My own view is that Huckabee is far worse than Long and Long, whatever his faults, was the genuine populist, or at least anti-establishment, article. Huckabee, with his regressive tax scam, is no more a populist than he his a conservative.
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Would you be hung up if I could pick any one law and have virtual immunity to violate it like every ILLEGAL immigrant does? If you look deeper into Ron Paul’s writing, I think you will find he is more open on LEGAL immigration than the rest, who simply want to give amnesty to those already here then maybe slam the door or create a corporatist, exploitive “guest worker” program. And how DO we do “Real ID” with immigrants - if they work, just asking to see the ID should prove or disprove citizenship or legal immigrant status. But Paul is against this too. And all he wants to do is remove the welfare incentives and let the market work.
But maybe you support amnesty? Fine. Let them announce a 100% tax amnesty for 2009, and I’ll refile my W-4 as well as several returns. Oh, but that would be illegal and fraud? So how would me being undocumented or misdocumented be different from the undocumented or misdocumented immigrant?
Ron Paul believes in the rule of law.
And he seems better at theology than Huckabee - has the latter ever read Augustine or Aquinas on anything, much less just war doctrine? (Oh, the irony of Ron Paul being a better Roman Catholic than most of those next to me at church - but love of truth tends to do that).
Perhaps the Baptist layman can teach the Baptist teacher a thing or two. (I SO want them to go one on one, even on theology - maybe he can do up a “just war” educate mike reading list).
Huckabee might still get the televangelical vote. His Huckathon is scheduled for the 27th.
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Big Government Conservatism.....
The Deecider’s “Compassionate Conservatism” relies heavily on the Religious Right’s apocalyptic and crusading desires. People swoon and look for the patriarchs to make things better and “provide for the people”. They want to be whipped into a state of ecstasy and are easy marks for the kinds of Mountebanks that inhabit our besotted government, slipping fistfuls of earmarks into every piece of unwarranted legislation.
There is virtually no difference between the aggressive entitlement of our current political operators and the pampered, indulged and narcissistic leaders in televangelism , who live like earthly kings as a result of their facility at speaking to large complacent crowds who check their skepticism at the door. It really is a kind of rabid burlesque show , our unwholesome alliance of Big Religion and Big Government.
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@ Andrew Capp:
While I admire and agree with most all of your posts, I canoot baide the indictment of all wo disagree with your view on immigration as “pitiful” and “fearful” of the “brown skinned.” Give Chilton Williamson’s “The Immigration Mystique” a chance if you haven’t already for another eloquent Catholic Conservativee’s
, besides yourself that is, perspective on the most vexing issue of our time from a moral standpoint.
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Huckabee may be a supporter of so-called compassionate conservatism which is just an expansion of the welfare state, but he is no religious leftist. The religious left is almost always theologically as well as politically liberal. Huckabee is not a theological liberal. That is why the elitist, anti-evangelical establishment is so hysterical.
I think people underestimate to what degree Huck and Ron Paul are competing for the same votes. They are both trying to get the “thumbing your nose at the establishment” vote. All the Huck bashing just makes him look more like an authentic anti-establishment candidate.
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I don’t think Iowa yokels that want for agricultural subsidies and tariffs are a natural Ron Paul constituency.
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Huckabee’s “Flat Tax” (abolishing the progressive income tax) has about as much chance of being enacted, as Ron Paul’s call to return to the “Gold Standard”....both are ridiculous notions, and nobody wants either of them, especially the “Values Voters” that Huckabee is romancing.
It’s really tiresome for “libertarians” to go around pretending they are going to appeal to white working class and middle class voters that make up the bedrock of the Republican Party vote with issues like abolishing the progressive income tax or privatizing social security or the Federal Reserve. The hot issues for them are defending their communities and families from the forces of neo-Marxism or “multi-culturalism/diversity” crowd, and doing something about their declining economic security, which means a return to economic nationalism.
Hey, Daniel, that means stopping ALL immigration, not just illegal immigration until wages start rising again, as well as dumping “free trade” (actually not really free at all) and getting out of “free trade” agreements like NAFTA.
That’s not CATO/AHF/FED/World Bank/IMF “libertarianism” by any means. Which is the only REAL “libertarianism” there is. The US war to modernize thee Mideast, turn Islam into the equivalent of the Episcopal Church, and securing the oil to continue propping up the Petro-Dollar is a war to defend the “libertarian” vision of a world without borders or trade barriers
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There’s nothing wrong with Huey Long, he kicked the asses of the wealthy elite in Louisania, built a modern highway system, and books and public schools for poor people with the ill-begotten wealth of the Oil Oligarchs.
We need another Huey Long to kick some CEO ass around here.
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I can’t wait to see Joe Populist out there in the fields picking cabbage…
Bend and stoop, boy, bend and stoop!
Then he’ll say “gee, isn’t this economic nationalism grand?!”
Wages are falling because of monetary inflation, not immigrants picking cabbage, hanging drywall, or busing tables.
Hey, William Jennings Bryan called from the grave, he wants his platform back!
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Martin,
Given the fact that Mr. McCarthy is contrasting the stances of Huckabee, who supports intervening in Iran, to Ron Paul, the foreign positions of Hunter and Tancredo merit discussion.
That you are a one-issue voter is not relavant. Your later comment about the US nuking every third world country clarifies your disingenuousness.
Bede,
Thank you for the thoughtful response.
Professor Gottfried,
Tancredo and Hunter both oppose nation building in theory and reject the idea of democratization being a reason to go to war. Lieberman does not.
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Great post and after the deletions of Andy Capp/Sid and friends an excellent group of comments.
I suggest everyone follow my method, paste the comments to MS Word, delete Andy Capp/Sid post, and then read. You’ll be amazed at how much more intelligent the thread is.
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Typically, I consider Ann Coulter an execrable neocon clowness whose essays are not to be taken seriously. The following, in re the Huckster, is an exception: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=24068
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Who is Howard Buffet? Aren’t you talking about Warren Buffett?
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Ron-considering Tancredo and Hunter both support the Iraq War, the stench of neocons sticks to them.
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America needs a President not a “National Pastor”. There is a difference, so vote accordingly!
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Andy Capp sez: “Wages are falling because of monetary inflation, not immigrants picking cabbage, hanging drywall, or busing tables.”
Wages are falling because while jobs are being “outsourced to China and India, the new jobs being created are mainly bartenders and housemaids. YOUR America doesn’t create anything that anyone wants, and what the US does manage to export is subsidized by the government.
The wages of the “Mexicans picking cabbage and hanging drywall” of course, are also subsidized by the government in the form of the Unearned Income Tax credit, food stamps, subsidized housing, and the other forms of wealth transfer from the public to the people who hire them.
Of course, the hypocrisy of the “libertarian“ position on “free“ trade is plainly not “free”, as the US retains it’s protections for lawyers, doctors, dentists and the other highly paid workers, who don’t have to compete with foreign workers. The average dentist makes $150,000 a year, so if we really had “free” <snicker> trade, and foreign dentists could enter the US to practice medicine, and THEIR wages fell to $100,000, then the savings to the public would be incomparable to the “Mexicans picking cabbage and hanging drywall” that YOU champion. As <snicker> “free trade”.
Oh, and none other then Ron Paul is a doctor, and of course, this so-called “libertarian” is also the beneficiary of this form of protectionism.
But then again, YOU and the other “Libertarian” ideologues were never very consistent when it comes to their own self interest. Let others bear the burden of YOUR notion of a “free society”.
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Andy Capp sez: Hey, William Jennings Bryan called from the grave, he wants his platform back!
Now you are snickering at the social gospel of Jesus?
It’s funny watching the “libertarians” like McCarthy and you get all hot and bothered over Huckabee pandering to the fundamentalists, when of course, the Republican Party has been stoking the fires of the culture war for years to get elected.
Republicans talk like populists on social issues but govern like plutocrats, in much the same way as “libertarians” yak about “freedom” and then support every form of state intervention that gives those who have the most, a little more.
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You didn’t need to cite Paul’s vote on partial birth abortion as an exception to his respect for states’ rights. Roe v Wade took jurisdiction over abortion away from the states, so whether Paul voted yes or no on partial birth abortion, the states would have no say in the matter. Yes gave it to Congress and No to the Supreme Court. No way to vote for states’ rights on that one. Paul’s consistency is not violated on that vote.
Paul’s heresy is on immigration: time-restricted visas, immigration quotas, eminent domain seizures of private property to build border fences, and money and manpower to block the travel and change of residence of people without the proper papers are all collectivist and coercive (and I see no authority in the Constitution for those who care about such things). As for the argument that residents without papers are lawbreakers, I would shudder at the thought that Paul would apply the same logic to the drug laws, Patriot Act, Military Commissons Act, asset forfeiture, gun laws, and tax laws (he won’t, of course, which is why I don’t actually shudder). When the law violates rights, “the law is a ass.”
Of course, he is still a giant among the pygmies in this race, and War is the Health of the State, so he has my enthusiastic support notwithstanding my disagreement on immigration.
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Howard Buffet was Warren’s father. He was an antiwar congressman from Nebraka who fought American entry into WW2.He is a Hero to antiwar Republicans.Too bad Warren isn’t like his old man.Joe Tancredo is dropping out,who are you backing?Pat Buchanan is coming out for Ron Paul,thats what I heard now that Bay doesn’t have a job anymore.
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Sure Huey long was a scoundrel and hypocrite, (99.9% of politicians are), but he was anti World War One. Hickabee is a militant fascist who probably never met a war on (fill in the blank)he didn’t like. That said, no one running other than Ron Paul has any interest in saving the USA from its impeding fiscal and moral bankruptcy.
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Rumor has it that the “Huckabilly” was an ilegitemate half brother to Bill Clinton, always locked in a closet with nothing to read but his bible.
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“c. matt” wonders about how to solve the illegal alien problem. Here’s the answer: DEPORT THEM! Don’t say it can’t be done—it was done in the 1950s (Ike took his oath of office seriously). And only a handful of illegals were actually deported under “Operation Wetback” (Google it)—the vast majority got the message and left on their own. The same thing is happening today at the state level. Illegals are fleeing Oklahoma as a crackdown there is about to take effect. Enact identical laws in other states and “Operaction Wetback II” will be an accomplished fact.
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So, who do you deport, and to where?
Anyone with a skin tone darker than a certain level?
Anyone with a Spanish name?
Anyone that can’t speak English at a certain level?
No, none of the above.
Do you know what it would take?
Deport anyone without an official US government issued Federal Identification Card/Internal Passport.
I advise you to vote for Giuliani, he’s all for an American interal passport, so we can keep track of who is eligible for federal welfare programs and who is to be deported.
If you want a good study in police-state tyranny, Operation Wetback is as good of place as any to start.
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“Paul’s heresy is on immigration: time-restricted visas, immigration quotas, eminent domain seizures of private property to build border fences, and money and manpower to block the travel and change of residence of people without the proper papers are all collectivist and coercive (and I see no authority in the Constitution for those who care about such things).” also “When the law violates rights, “the law is a ass.” “
Since when do foreigners have the right to come into our country as they damn well please? How would Less Antman like it if fifteen or twenty illegal aliens decided to move into the house next door? Tarking on the lawn and defecating wherever convenient is not a recipe for keeping an attractive neighborhood. Not to mention all the services provided by others (i.e. taxpayers) they avail themselves of.
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Ron Lewenberg wrote:
“What do you think of Ron Paul channeling the Ralph Neas with his comments about Fascism comming to America in a flag and cross?”
Fascism is government and corporations being in cahoots. Wake up and smell the fascism; a kinder and gentler fascism is all around us. You probably still think we have a democracy.
Ron Paul is the country’s only hope of not becoming a full-blown police state and evil empire.
Excellent article and analysis.
http://www.awrm.org
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RE; Mr. Populist’s assertion that the CATO-IMF-etc types represent libertarianism is buying into what these Institutional Elaphantitus gluttons want the world to think. They are no more libertarian than Pee Wee Herman. They are an outgrowth of this large beast we’ve come to pamper on the Potomac.
Granted these institutions blather on about Free Market Principles while wielding their hidden hand clad in a boxing glove but so what, they are not libertarian, never have been , never will be. It is like King Louis XVI going to a Jacobin meeting and wearing his tricolor only to repair to the private quarters and stomp on the thing.
It is quite possible that this clannish and mechanistic species is incapable of libertarian government or an anarchistic existence that champions the individual because ...well.....the species is a tad seedy, falling all to hell as soon as it gets the freedoms it clamors for.
Still, I’ll take Mr. Paul because he at least has proven chops in opposition to the Big Government Farrago and he spends a lot of time reminding people of the tools we already possess to return to some form of intelligent self-rule.
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Tancredo and Hunter both voted for the evil Patriot
Act and both also wanted it to become permanent.
http://senate.ontheissues.org/Tom_Tancredo.htm
http://senate.ontheissues.org/Duncan_Hunter.htm
Ron Paul will come out on top no matter what happens.
His message can’t be stopped now the genie is out of
the bottle.
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‘As Phyllis Schlafly has warned, Huckabee “destroyed the conservative movement in Arkansas, and left the Republican Party a shambles. … Yet some of the same evangelicals who sold us on George W. Bush as a ‘compassionate conservative’ are now trying to sell us on Mike Huckabee.”’
Phyllis Schlafly, the one whose fund raiser mailings name drop Rush “The Cysto Kid” Limbaugh? She’s suspect in my book.
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Joe Populist,
Please explain why you believe that the Gold Standard is a “ridiculous notion”.
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@ Mr. Capp,
As a legal immigrant I am already required to carry with me the “green card” as proof of my legality to live here. But that was a restriction I voluntarily accepted, when the American people invited me.
The police state comes when the natives are required to carry an I.D.. And that will be the request of the American people when the US is overrun by uninvited “guests”.
Is it just a coincidence that the neocons all advocate unfettered immigration? It will be a lot easier for them to institute fascism when the average American feel threatened by too many undocumented people, who do not appear to give a damn about the local laws and conventions.
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Maybe some do not see the danger Americans face today--put into prespective I submit
the following
A.We are under the Patriot act. Which strips us of our Constitutional freedom as Americans.
B.We have executive orders by this administation that suspends our military
mandate that they can not wage war against the American people.
C.We have a congress that refuses to seal our boarders agains a invasion that will strip us of our sovereignty.
D.We have a military protecting 137 nations while our boarders are open.
E.We have A north American Super Highway being put forth by our government as we write.
F.We have a educational federal program that is hell bent on teaching your kids
what the elite want them dumed down to.
G. But what the hell we have a good TV set to watch--Right!!!!
H.We have a choice--Elect Ron Paul if he is lucky enough to survive being a true American. The rest is up to AMERICANS!
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Jon asked: “Please explain why you believe that the Gold Standard is a “ridiculous notion”.”
Well, gold is a great store of value, but a failure of a medium of exchange. Which is the mainstream “libertarian” position since Milton Friedman won the Noble Prize for supposedly “proving” that the Great Depression was caused by a contraction in the money supply. Since then, nobody but crackpots believe in returning to the Gold Standard.
Essentially, the supply of gold coinage doesn’t grow with the economy…in the late Nineteenth Century it caused deflations, which had dire consequences for farmers, which at the time constituted the majority of the population. There was actually a lack of coinage to conduct transactions, and private banks issued their own money, often with speculative excess and mismangement caused a neverending series of booms and disastrous busts.
I certainly have reservations about the FED, which is “privatized money” actually. I would rather return to the “Greenbacks” system with the government issuing money directly, rather the convolted system with have with the Federal Reserve. (Most of the idiots on the “libertarian right think that Federal Reserve notes are the same as “fiat currency”, but in truth it is a privatized money system.)
But the main problem with the FED has been the management of it by the “Libertarian” Alan Greenspan, a noxious Jew in the tradition of the Rothchild banking family, whose only interest was to increase the wealth and profits of the Wall Street Bankers and the Investment community at the expense of the middle class economic security.
Greenspan is a notorious member of the original “inner circle” of the Satanic cult of Ayn Rand, whose is quite open about his bias toward speculative investments and creating wealth for those who already have the most wealth. Among his “accomplishments” was to raise the Social Security Payroll taxes---ostensible to create a cushion for the baby boomers’ retirement--but actually to hide the failure of the Reagan Tax Cuts to generate enough new growth to cover the deficits they created. Greenspan is also largely responsible for the Internet “dot-con” bubble and more recently the present real estate crisis.
A good book on Greenspan is by Ravi Batra, called “Greenspan’s Fraud” which points out the failure of the foundation of the Republican Party---tax cuts generate enough new economic growth so that tax revenue grows faster then deficits. This is as obvious a total lie (as the budget deficits prove) as the idiotic idea that globalization and “free trade” are creating as many new jobs and business as it’s dismantling.
Of course, the war in Iraq is all about defending this crazy “libertarian” idea of “open borders for labor and capital”, and propping up the system of globalization consisting of the World Bank/IMF---which the FED is intrinsically connected. A war not for oil per se, but for the Petrodollar, to maintain the ponzi scheme that has been imposed on us all.
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Sabin sed: “Mr. Populist’s assertion that the CATO-IMF-etc types represent libertarianism is buying into what these Institutional Elaphantitus gluttons want the world to think…. these institutions blather on about Free Market Principles while wielding their hidden hand clad in a boxing glove but so what, they are not libertarian, never have been , never will be.”
They are the MAINSTREAM of the libertarian ideology---which is and always has been a rationale to defend plutocracy. The Paulettes are considered as crackpots in much the same way as way as Nader and Kuchinch are viewed in the Democrat Party.
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Joe the Poppy why don’t you read a few of Dr. Paul’s books on monetary and economic policy.Educate yourself it can’t hurt.
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Well JP, I suppose an assignment to Crackpothood in this besotted age would actually be a great honor. The old Anarch-Buzzard loving writer Ed Abbey once quipped “only the half mad are wholly alive” and so , Us Crazies don’t give a Rats Ass. You may insult at will. However........some ground rules.
Though no real fan of His Impenetrability Greenspan, I do believe we could resort to a higher caliber of invective than some of the characterizations....old Bolsheviki Saws really..... seen within this stream. “Noxious _ _ _ “s “ and “Satanic Cults” and such, surely we could come up with something less derivative ...a little less tabloidal and far more picturesque than that. We have certain Polemical Standards to uphold here and these corner gas station free-for-alls simply won’t do. Try reading a little Mencken or Ambrose Bierce or Twain and you will find your curmudgeonability markedly improve to literary levels befitting this hotbed of High Mass Dyspepsia.
As to the Gold Standard vs. Fiat Money vs. Private Money and Greenbacks....might we just agree that it is prudent to base one’s currency on something tangible so as not to have to rely on Nice Boy Benny Bernanke’s trusty printing presses? Bat guano, Mica Chips, Hubcaps, Unemployed Hollywood Writers, something one can pick up, hold or bite, just to make sure it’s there? Printing Presses and Hidden Hands do not seem to foot the bill.
If the Cato and IMF folks want to call themselves Libertarian, who are we to quibble? Brooks and Kristol call themselves “journalists” after all and el Deeciderosa and his vicious band of smiling sycophants, the Sunbeams for the Unitary Executive call themselves Republicans while Harry the stormin Mormon Reid calls himself a Democrat and so the bar seems to have been lowered a tad.......
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I’m a transgender woman who plans to vote for Ron Paul.
Nationwide laws don’t change what people in one part of the country or another think about gay marriage, abortion or any other social issue. The result is that local governments or other groups of citizens end up doing more or less that the people think is appropriate for their social and cultural milieu. Thus, abourtion is not available in the majority of counties--and even a few entire states--at least in part because large numbers of people in the community oppose it. And, even if there were a Constitutional amendment defining marriage--whether as the union of two people of opposing sexes or of the same sex, it would not guaruante that , say, a man who wanted to wed another man in Utah or Tennessee would be able to do so.
Ron Paul certainly has the right idea on those two issues: Neither marriage nor abortion are any of the Federal government’s business, one way or the other. In fact, I contend that marriage should not be the concern of any government at any level. If any government wants to be involved, it should be only to issue certificates of coupledom or some such thing.
In fact, I like Ron Paul on just about every issue. He’s a conservative Christian, but he doesn’t want to legislate religious beliefs, wheterh de jure or de facto. He understands that you cannot guarantee your own freedoms by restricting someone else’s.
Finally, there is his stance on the war. I, too, have opposed it fromt he say GW put a price on Osama’s head. I am against that wars, and nearly all wars, for ethical and moral reasons. I know what it’s like to be hated simply because you’re different than someone else--or, just as bad, to be exploited for essentially the same reason. That, in a nutshell, is the source of most conflagrations. Of course, this war and most others are indefensible from a Constitutional standpoint, and are bad in all sorts of ways for the economy.
I’m perfectly willing to stand all day in my highest heels to stump for Ron Paul. Never before have I felt taht way about a candidate for public office!
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Sabin sed: “...might we just agree that it is prudent to base one’s currency on something tangible so as not to have to rely on Nice Boy Benny Bernanke’s trusty printing presses?”
As I said before, gold is a great store of value, but a terrible medium of exchange. The money supply should be based on the productivity of the economy...not some arbitrary commodity like gold or silver whose supply is variable or fixed. That created the problems of deflation, or the public forced to resort to bank notes, which leaves the economy vulnerable to bank fraud and failures--both situations happened repeatedly during the Nineteenth century.
As for “libertarianism’, it is a utopian fantasy, a preoccupation of hormone inflicted & deluded adolescent boys…but the reality is that more often the defenders of “freedom” are noxious defenders of plutocracy like Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand and Neuter Gingrich and Dick Armey.
The main problem of the FED has been Alan Greenspan, but more importantly the noxious theories on which he based his policies---mainly that capital is more important then labor.
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Lack sed: “Joe the Poppy why don’t you read a few of Dr. Paul’s books on monetary and economic policy.Educate yourself it can’t hurt.”
Oh, I’ve read Von Mises and Hayek and Rothbard. In my youuthful innocence I was also seduced by the ideology of “freedom”...I’m no socialist, I belive in private property and the superiority of the price system over central planning.
I am well aquainted wiht “libertarian” in my youth. Which is why I am qualified to challenge it...YAF, SIL, etc....
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To all you believers in libertarian ideals let me clarify what Joe Populist is trying to tell you:
You are not smart enough to take care of yourself and you need to be protected from such exploiters as Greenspan et al. by people, with better intentions and motives. He obviously knows who these people are, but does not tell us yet.
Why don’t you just trust him?
After all, you believed George W., when he promised you a more humble foreign policy!
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Come now Joe, “the main problem with the FED has been Alan Greenspan”, thats like saying “the main problem with the U.S. is George W. Bush”. Neither will be a tad different with either gone, both as dysfunctional as their essential philosophies and militant bureaucracies allow.
As for assertions of libertarians and adolescence, I’ve usually found adolescents to have a preternatural faith in the good works of democrat government and so falling in line with feel-good liberal democrat politics. This excepts those sinister little geegs like certain Presidential advisors who join the College Republicans after years of being made to feel miserable due to some inherited or imagined defect and find there a salubrious atmosphere, chock full of the kinds of sadistic hijinks beloved of the brownshirted hall monitor set, nose encircled not with gin blossoms but a ring imprinted whilst seeking nirvana up southern precincts. Republicans may say they are Democrats mugged by Reality but a libertarian is usually someone who is tired of the continuous mugging by government (and in the case of the current mugging, a tag team duo of Big Government and Big Business)....this takes time. Sad to admit though, a lot of us are sentimental cave dwellers, slavishly watching every detail of a dystopic society while claiming to detest it. Professional Train Wreck Spectators. Moths who like the smell of singed wings. Usually romantic old fools, we would like to think that humanity aint as dumb as it has amply demonstrated. My own romantic proclivities are such that I aint quite given up on my Republican Registration because I foolishly think something may still be there to save after these dung beetles have had their way with it. Still though, it is not as romantic a hope as the poor democrats, who still think there is such a party after labor has largely vanished from the scene, replaced by discount shopping, entertainment and a money game they are not too good at.
Capital is made easier to value more than labor when one can print greenbacks with a minimum of labor. A tangible asset requires labor to create-find-excavate-craft-stockpile or inventory it. Printing presses are the factory of the imagination, perhaps generating assets with the sell of their product but not conducive of asset creation all by they little ole selves. Sure, even tangible assets can be perverted by the smoke and mirrors of adept perverters but at least, in the end, they are not simply a wheelbarrow of paper, hollowed out by Fractional Reserve Banking.
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“Want to pay 30 percent more on everything you now buy? Then the “Fair Tax” is for you. The rate is so high because, like every fraudulent tax reform, it’s revenue neutral. For most Americans, it would be a tax hike, since sales taxes are regressive, affecting the middle class and poor more than the wealthy, while our current income tax is progressive, disproportionately hurting the rich.”
Once again, McCarthy shows his ignorance and unwillingness to do real research. If the FairTax were enacted, Americans would not be paying 30 percent more on everything they buy. The FairTax includes a tax return-like refund of all taxes paid for necessities (e.g. toiletries, food, housing supplies). In essence, this means that the FairTax is the OPPOSITE of REGRESSIVE. While it does not disproportionately hurt the rich, it essentially saves the middle and lower class from paying almost any taxes. Since poor people usually only have enough money to get by buying necessities, all of the taxes they would be paying would be refunded. Nice try, though…
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As an American who is currently in the middle east and who has spent a lot of time here, I am the first to say that ron paul is naive and a nitwit, and most of his followers are either naive or conspiracy theorists.
People do not understand it is not just our military presence that causes such things as 9/11… in fact, that is probably a minor contributor. The real problem is our economic policies, which I agree with, but are perceived over here as raping the land and its people, pushing the evil capitalism, our movies from hollywood, etc. All of this will only increase with the supercapitalist ron paul.
If he somehow won the presidency, which of course he won’t, his stupid policies of disbanding the CIA will only serve to not let us know then the next 9/11 happens, and it will.
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Thomas sed: “While it does not disproportionately hurt the rich, it essentially saves the middle and lower class from paying almost any taxes…”
NOT TRUE! The “Fair Tax” would NOT replace the Social Security or Medicare Payroll Taxes, which account for MOST of the taxes that middle class people pay. Unlike the income tax, the payroll taxes are not subject to deductions (like mortgage deduction or child care credit, or marriage) currently, and would continue even if Huckabee’s “Fair Tax” was enacted.
One of the biggest frauds going on is the constant propaganda that the Social Security System is going bankrupt, while at the same time has been providing a SURPLUS since they were raised 5 times in the last 10 years to hide the failures of the Reagan Tax Cuts…later it was largely the SURPLUS from the Social Security Payroll Taxes that Clinton used to claim
Give the fact that labor income is taxed at twice the rate of investment income, and that the payroll taxes are not subject to deductions, and provide 45% of the Federal Tax revenues, the simple fact is that “rich” ---those with incomes over $250,000---pay approximately 18% of all Federal Taxes.
This situation would become even worse under Huckabee’s “Fair Tax”…
No McCarthy, Huckabee is NO “Huey Long”! He’s another Republican PIMP for the rich, talking like a populist, but governing like a plutocrat.
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Captain D and Joe Populist - Could I interest you in the Duncan Hunter for president campaign?
Captain D: Congressman Hunter has no illusions about the security dangers to this country posed by radical muslims in the Middle East. He most certainly isn’t going to gut our intelligence and defense establishments.
Joe Populist: Duncan Hunter is the ONLY candidate in this race with a long, proven record of opposing the flood of Third World workers into this country, as well as the wholesale movement of the U.S. industrial base overseas, both of which are responsible for driving wages down in this country. He has been the driving force behind the creation of a secure wall on our border with Mexico, and is one of the few members of congress who raised the alarm about Communist China a decade ago. He has the most solid economic nationalist credentials in this race.
You haven’t heard much about about Hunter in the press, though, since he’s not a globalist and also has a rather gruff and earnest personality, as you would expect of a decorated former military man. The media, and evidently the American public, prefer charismatic mountebanks instead of men of substance like Rep. Hunter.
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Captain D:
Your assessment of Ron Paul’s policy towards the causes of the Arab’s and Iranian’s animosity towards the US as being naive, flies in the face of common sense and the opinion of the majority of American soldiers in the Middle East, who obviously are in agreement with Ron Paul, when they send him campaign contributions.
If the KGB had behaved as openly here as the CIA has been operating in the Middle East, we would have declared war on the Soviet Union.
The CIA is furthering only the interests of those that do make a “killing” (monetary and literally) over there. And all at the expense of the average American. Do you really want to tell us that it is now cheaper and safer to travel with an American passport through those countries, than it was before the CIA started its meddling?
The only people in favor of our meddling are those that make a living off that policy at the expense of the productive Americans. Another term for them is “parasites” and we should treat them as such.
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“Fair Tax” eh...? Sounds to me like a Hooker who has just informed you she gave you a dose of “Good Clap. King George considered his taxes on the colonies to be “Fair Taxes”. Who dreams these things up? More importantly, how do they ever get traction enough to withstand withering laughter at the outset?
As for Duncan Hunter, he appears to me to be that special kind of California Republican who ran up against the Pacific Ocean, was denied his own continued Westering and so is now proceeding to colonize the U.S. Government as though it were a territory for exclusive use and enrichment. Values Republicans are Big Government Republicans, a perversion .....a reason why the populace cannot tell its’ arse from a hole in the Constitution.
How about this Joe P, given you appear to prefer that we base the currency upon something ephemeral , like the “productivity of the economy” and that you therefoer seem to be sympathetic to that cheerful bunch who recite the glories of the so called “Growth Economy”...well, how about we start a “Dimwit Index”, a Stock Exchange created expressly to measure the growing legions of affable consumers who service the entertainment and gimcrackery industries that count upon the citizenry’s average intelligence sinking like the Titanic, in slow motion. This is a growth industry that knows no bounds.
Captain D....., I don’t know what it is you’re doing over there but perhaps you did not hear....the CIA failed to alert us prior to 9/11 and so what makes you think they can do so in the future? Granted, the NSA advised The Brushcutter In Chief of various potential plots but either the warning was lukewarm or half-baked enough that when added to the Executive’s Imperviousness, it might as well have been shouted out the window from the corner of that expensive spook hall at Langley.
It aint capitalism that Osama decries, he’s a rich boy like our own witless scion. Without his inheritance and cash contacts, he’d be nothing....well at least far less than what this government has dutifully turned him into. What is wrong here is we have a Government-Business Syndicate that thinks it is it’s God-Granted Right to set the economic agenda....an agenda which it thinks can be based upon printing presses, debt and a whalloping big set of brass knuckles. If we had the ability to turn our Anti-Racketeering laws against our own government (Rico, meet Uncle Sam, Uncle Sam, Rico) , we might return the harlot of Big Government Capitalism (A syndicate of Government and Big Business) to the respectability it has had over the ages by reducing the role of the government in the economy. This current Government is a Pimp with a printing press and his string of whores is beginning to show its age.
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“They sacrifice their children to this war.”
Well, not exactly. They would sacrifice our children, but never their own. That they leave up to the easily deluded “christian conservatives” who think W is actually a Christian.
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Poor Mit Romney, he was born with the Silver Gavel of judgment that America may grant to the highly born. His father told Americans which brand of car they should buy, and apparently was successful enough to be credited with the salvation of American Motors. Now Mit wants to prescribe the type of President Americans should vote for, only he finds himself locked in a tussle with a hillbilly and he can’t seem to gain the upper hand. Mit should have considered one question before it all started: Did the hillbilly want the fight?
Mit, and others, suggest that Mike Huckabee is too liberal to be a Republican or an Evangelical. The critics don’t know what kind of campaign they are up against.
The leading yellow/blue /any dog will do, if Democratic, political maven of the current age is by his own admission Louisiana born James Carville. So what has that to do with Huck the Republican?
Huck is the latest manifestation of the Southern Insurgency Campaign. That model carried two Democrats to victory. Huck is the first Republican to assume the mantle of Leader of Middle America.
Huck is where he wants to be. He is the boy next door or, even better, the neighbor you invite into your home for a casual cup of coffee and a chat. Mit is the guy with an immigration problem on the front lawn of his estate. Mit is the guy with a name like “Mit” as if he was on the wrong side of animal house.
Huck is the candidate of the living room. The national living room is in Middle America. He is also the latest manifestation of America’s love affair with Arkansas. Arkansas is the girl in your class who is just a little rough around the edges with a daddy who is really rough and a grandpa who frightens everyone. They live outside of town and her voice reminds you of Loretta Lynn. But, she also has a direct, open approach that disarms and beguiles. You don’t want your friends to know it, but you know who Loretta Lynn is and you really “like” Arkansas.
In other words, Huck would be the perfect candidate for Carville who likes to keep things simple and focused. What would be unusual is the focus of the campaign, “It’s the culture, stupid” might be the admonition to headquarters. Carville handles Democrats and the cultural issues are best treated like sleeping dogs: Let them lie.
Enroll Huck right up there with Clinton and Wal-Mart as successful exports from Dogpatch. Does America still shop at Sears? Kenmore appliances, Craftsmen tools, and Die-Hard batteries are becoming the stuff of legend, much like the earlier buffalo that provided Native Americans with the food they ate, the clothes they wore, and the way of life that reflected the migratory bison. Food and clothing are now found at Wal-Mart, a five and dime operation from Hicksville.
Anyone who believes Benton, Arkansas is Hicksville probably believes that an aristocratic preppy from the East can run negative ads and pull substantial numbers of votes away from Huck. Mit Romney is up against a boy from “fly over” country and he is not prepared for the contest.
“Fly over” is the territory that spreads out between the two coasts. It’s prominent feature is the prairie land that that is found from Texas to Canada. I t turns out that one of the critical formative jurisdictions in the Kingdom of Middle America is the lowly, unassuming State of Arkansas.
Arkansas finds solid footing with its southern base lying on Louisiana, but when it looks up the view is of Missouri and the Midwest.
Arkansas is therefore a hybrid state. It is both Southern and Midwestern. Those regions are the repository of the set of values that linger from the period when men rode horses to herd cattle and harnessed mules to work the soil. Those values controlled the political destiny of America in an era when conservative Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans could run the Congressional Branch and serve the agricultural and energy interests of their regions.
During the preceding 108 years before the next President is sworn or affirmed into office, the line-up of states that contributed native sons to the Oval Office is:
1901-1909 New York
1909-1913 Ohio
1913-1920 New Jersey (native of South Carolina)
1921- 1923 Ohio
1923-1929 Massachusetts (native of Vermont)
1929-1933 California (International Businessman
1933-1945 New York
1945-1953 Missouri
1953-1961 National Candidate
1961-1963 Massachusetts.
1963-1969 Texas
1969-1974 New York/California/National
1974-1977 Michigan (non-elected)
1977-1981 Georgia
1981-1990 California
1989-1993 Texas
1993-2001 Arkansas
2001-2009 Texas
In other words, the directional flow of Presidential politics is western and southern. Consider the once mighty Democrats who could command a “solid south”. Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy were wealthy northerners who provided 20 years of occupancy of the oval office to the Democrats. Those candidates have not been heard from in 48 years. The only Democrats who could win since 1960 were from Texas, Georgia, and Arkansas.
Lyndon Johnson is not useful for this analysis because he is an exception. He spent his career in Washington, D.C. Therefore, his victory as an incumbent in 1964 is not comparable to the campaigns of Carter from Georgia and Clinton from Arkansas.
It may be argued that southern candidates can beat the odds because there is some residual vibrancy in the Southern and Midwestern alliance arising from a natural affinity.
If that is true, then the affinity probably stems from unity against a common enemy: The Eastern and Western coasts of America.
This affinity may be traced to the Cross of Gold. In what became fly over country there was an elemental hatred of “tight money” that kept small farms in a cycle of endless debt.
This was transmitted into the knowledge that the sophisticates of the Coasts were different from people who spoke with distinctive regional accents.
There is also a more practical reason for the success of Clinton and Carter. They had votes living and working in large cities outside of the south when they arrived in the distant lands. The Voting Rights Act made those candidates into contenders. Southern politicians had to learn how to garner African-American votes because they found themselves in districts that were populated by substantial numbers of minorities who had never voted before. Politicians in other regions of the nation handled black voters with dismissive smugness by having already factored them into a political machine.
Both Clinton and Carter were post Voting Rights Southern Governors who went through the transformational years of Southern Politics. They knew how to meet the needs of African-American voters and this was the key to their electoral success. Huck garnered unusually high percentages of African-American votes in Arkansas for a Republican.
Finally, insurgent Southern campaigns have the advantage of knowing the terrain better than their opponents. This is due to the fact that the national debates have become forums for discussions of “Southern” issues. To update the late Speaker Tip O’Neil, all politics may retain a local character, but the substantive debates indicate that all politics is now “southern”.
Race is the most significant issue in political debate. That was always true of the South, but not of the nation. Ronald Reagan could mean it when he asserted that he did not know there were racial divisions in America when he was a young man. No one could make such an assertion today with apparent sincerity.
Trade and tariffs were the issues that animated discussions of national policy in the South. NAFTA, free trade and the value of the dollar are on the agenda in 2008. Immigration is associated with names like Jackson, Houston, and Crockett, Southerners who either provoked or participated in what may soon be called “The First Mexican Immigration War”. The only difference then was that southerners were the immigrants and Mexicans were trying to preserve their language and their law.
Mit sputters on about Huck’s liberality in taxation and softness on immigration. Mit probably never met a moderate Southern Democrat. True enough, Huck will stand and brag about beating the Clinton political machine, but he probably would feel at home with a meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council, a pro-business group that was instrumental in the rise of Clinton.
Huck is not Republican or Democrat and that is why he confounds Mit and others. He is not staking out a position to appeal to components of a party in the primary, with the goal of moving toward the center after the nomination. Huck is running for the center now. Huck is trying to win the nomination by geographical conquest while conventional wisdom teaches that a candidate wins by declaring a “position” or stance on issues.
Huck is trying to get invited into America’s Living Room. Mit may not know what is meant by “living room”. Middle America is the Living Room of the nation.
Accent, attitude, and background mean more than ideology. A candidate may misrepresent his ideology, but he better not lie about his background. Joe Biden appropriated the life of a British politician. He will never get a hearing on his ideas.
Poor Mit, he never lived in a rent house in Hope, Arkansas and he probably does not own any albums by Loretta Lynn. How does a guy from a deprived background of servants and ease compete with a hillbilly?
The interesting match-up will occur if Huck and Hillary each get nominated. Huck and Bill are both poor boys from Hope and worthy opponents. Poor Hillary, an upper middle class girl from Chicago, will have to determine the degree to which the electorate will let her depend upon her husband.
Poor Mit Romney, he was born with the Silver Gavel of judgment that America may grant to the highly born. His father told Americans which brand of car they should buy, and apparently was successful enough to be credited with the salvation of American Motors. Now Mit wants to prescribe the type of President Americans should vote for, only he finds himself locked in a tussle with a hillbilly and he can’t seem to gain the upper hand. Mit should have considered one question before it all started: Did the hillbilly want the fight?
Mit, and others, suggest that Mike Huckabee is too liberal to be a Republican or an Evangelical. The critics don’t know what kind of campaign they are up against.
The leading yellow/blue /any dog will do, if Democratic, political maven of the current age is by his own admission Louisiana born James Carville. So what has that to do with Huck the Republican?
Huck is the latest manifestation of the Southern Insurgency Campaign. That model carried two Democrats to victory. Huck is the first Republican to assume the mantle of Leader of Middle America.
Huck is where he wants to be. He is the boy next door or, even better, the neighbor you invite into your home for a casual cup of coffee and a chat. Mit is the guy with an immigration problem on the front lawn of his estate. Mit is the guy with a name like “Mit” as if he was on the wrong side of animal house.
Huck is the candidate of the living room. The national living room is in Middle America. He is also the latest manifestation of America’s love affair with Arkansas. Arkansas is the girl in your class who is just a little rough around the edges with a daddy who is really rough and a grandpa who frightens everyone. They live outside of town and her voice reminds you of Loretta Lynn. But, she also has a direct, open approach that disarms and beguiles. You don’t want your friends to know it, but you know who Loretta Lynn is and you really “like” Arkansas.
In other words, Huck would be the perfect candidate for Carville who likes to keep things simple and focused. What would be unusual is the focus of the campaign, “It’s the culture, stupid” might be the admonition to headquarters. Carville handles Democrats and the cultural issues are best treated like sleeping dogs: Let them lie.
Enroll Huck right up there with Clinton and Wal-Mart as successful exports from Dogpatch. Does America still shop at Sears? Kenmore appliances, Craftsmen tools, and Die-Hard batteries are becoming the stuff of legend, much like the earlier buffalo that provided Native Americans with the food they ate, the clothes they wore, and the way of life that reflected the migratory bison. Food and clothing are now found at Wal-Mart, a five and dime operation from Hicksville.
Anyone who believes Benton, Arkansas is Hicksville probably believes that an aristocratic preppy from the East can run negative ads and pull substantial numbers of votes away from Huck. Mit Romney is up against a boy from “fly over” country and he is not prepared for the contest.
“Fly over” is the territory that spreads out between the two coasts. It’s prominent feature is the prairie land that that is found from Texas to Canada. I t turns out that one of the critical formative jurisdictions in the Kingdom of Middle America is the lowly, unassuming State of Arkansas.
Arkansas finds solid footing with its southern base lying on Louisiana, but when it looks up the view is of Missouri and the Midwest.
Arkansas is therefore a hybrid state. It is both Southern and Midwestern. Those regions are the repository of the set of values that linger from the period when men rode horses to herd cattle and harnessed mules to work the soil. Those values controlled the political destiny of America in an era when conservative Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans could run the Congressional Branch and serve the agricultural and energy interests of their regions.
The directional flow of Presidential politics is western and southern. Consider the once mighty Democrats who could command a “solid south”. Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy were wealthy northerners who provided 20 years of occupancy of the oval office to the Democrats. Those candidates have not been heard from in 48 years. The only Democrats who could win since 1960 were from Texas, Georgia, and Arkansas.
Lyndon Johnson is not useful for this analysis because he is an exception. He spent his career in Washington, D.C. Therefore, his victory as an incumbent in 1964 is not comparable to the campaigns of Carter from Georgia and Clinton from Arkansas.
It may be argued that southern candidates can beat the odds because there is some residual vibrancy in the Southern and Midwestern alliance arising from a natural affinity.
If that is true, then the affinity probably stems from unity against a common enemy: The Eastern and Western coasts of America.
This affinity may be traced to the Cross of Gold. In what became fly over country there was an elemental hatred of “tight money” that kept small farms in a cycle of endless debt.
This was transmitted into the knowledge that the sophisticates of the Coasts were different from people who spoke with distinctive regional accents.
There is also a more practical reason for the success of Clinton and Carter. They had votes living and working in large cities outside of the south when they arrived in the distant lands. The Voting Rights Act made those candidates into contenders. Southern politicians had to learn how to garner African-American votes because they found themselves in districts that were populated by substantial numbers of minorities who had never voted before. Politicians in other regions of the nation handled black voters with dismissive smugness by having already factored them into a political machine.
Both Clinton and Carter were post Voting Rights Southern Governors who went through the transformational years of Southern Politics. They knew how to meet the needs of African-American voters and this was the key to their electoral success. Huck garnered unusually high percentages of African-American votes in Arkansas for a Republican.
Finally, insurgent Southern campaigns have the advantage of knowing the terrain better than their opponents. This is due to the fact that the national debates have become forums for discussions of “Southern” issues. To update the late Speaker Tip O’Neil, all politics may retain a local character, but the substantive debates indicate that all politics is now “southern”.
Race is the most significant issue in political debate. That was always true of the South, but not of the nation. Ronald Reagan could mean it when he asserted that he did not know there were racial divisions in America when he was a young man. No one could make such an assertion today with apparent sincerity.
Trade and tariffs were the issues that animated discussions of national policy in the South. NAFTA, free trade and the value of the dollar are on the agenda in 2008. Immigration is associated with names like Jackson, Houston, and Crockett, Southerners who either provoked or participated in what may soon be called “The First Mexican Immigration War”. The only difference then was that southerners were the immigrants and Mexicans were trying to preserve their language and their law.
Mit sputters on about Huck’s liberality in taxation and softness on immigration. Mit probably never met a moderate Southern Democrat. True enough, Huck will stand and brag about beating the Clinton political machine, but he probably would feel at home with a meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council, a pro-business group that was instrumental in the rise of Clinton.
Huck is not Republican or Democrat and that is why he confounds Mit and others. He is not staking out a position to appeal to components of a party in the primary, with the goal of moving toward the center after the nomination. Huck is running for the center now. Huck is trying to win the nomination by geographical conquest while conventional wisdom teaches that a candidate wins by declaring a “position” or stance on issues.
Huck is trying to get invited into America’s Living Room. Mit may not know what is meant by “living room”. Middle America is the Living Room of the nation.
Accent, attitude, and background mean more than ideology. A candidate may misrepresent his ideology, but he better not lie about his background. Joe Biden appropriated the life of a British politician. He will never get a hearing on his ideas.
Poor Mit, he never lived in a rent house in Hope, Arkansas and he probably does not own any albums by Loretta Lynn. How does a guy from a deprived background of servants and ease compete with a hillbilly?
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