second commandment republicans

from tmorange
to letters@time.com
date Mar 20, 2007 9:37 AM
subject Joe Klein, "The Second Commandment Republicans" (3/15)

Dear Editors,

I wonder if you and Mr. Klein appreciate the ironies in your story that tries to point up a kinder, gentler Christian right in the person of Mike Huckabee ("The Second Commandment Republicans," 3/15).

If Huckabee's January 28 performance on NBC's "Meet the Press" is any indication, he's hardly the "political inconvenience, a destroyer of stereotypes" that Klein makes him out to be. No, he's an evasive, backpedalling waffler whose extreme right-wing positions are out of step with the American mainstream. All he could say to Russert about how badly this president has botched the War in Iraq is that "he's had a lot of struggles" and "it's been a struggle for the president." How about the struggles of the families who have sent their children to die in Iraw under false pretenses?

At a conference of Southern Baptist pastors on June 7, 1998, Huckabee said: "I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ." Asked by Russert to clarify, he offered, "I think it's dangerous to say that we are a nation that ought to be pushed into a Christian faith by its leaders" -- which is of course exactly what he called for at the pastors' conference. Finally, he told Iowa's Christian Alliance in March 2006, "In our lifetimes, we've seen our country go from 'Leave It to Beaver' to 'Beavis and Butt-head,' from Barney Fife to Barney Frank, from 'Father Knows Best' to television shows where father knows nothing," subsequently defending this blatant piece of contempt for homosexuals and an affront to an elected offical a "rhetorical device" that "wasn't any particular attempt to be derisive of him." Rubbish.

Huckabee "talks like a liberal" only out of one corner of his mouth: with the other he backpedals and doubletalks his way through extreme right-wing positions. And as for the "moderate candidates who live like liberals" (referring to the multiple divorces of Giuliani, Gingrich, Romney and McCain), in fact the complete opposite of the time-worn stereotype of liberals reiterated unflinchingly by the so-called liberal media is true: Obama, Clinton and Edwards each remain married to their first and only spouses.