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February 22, 2008
McCain Has Far-Right on Speed Dial
It’s all over but the shouting in the Republican primary, and more and more right-wing figures are falling in line behind the presumptive nominee. Still, there are some hold-outs, unwilling to reject McCain (as James Dobson has) but hoping to squeeze the last few drops of their leverage into yet more concessions.
It seems to be working. Rather than looking towards building a broader coalition for the general election, McCain still seems to be concentrating on the last few corners of the Right. Grover Norquist, who just weeks ago was lambasting McCain for not signing his tax pledge, now gets to hear McCain mouth the promise again and again. And Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council must have been pleased to have been one of the first people McCain called when the senator was trying to manage the New York Times lobbyist story:
"It's early in the process and he's made inroads with social conservatives," said Perkins, who got a call from McCain shortly after his morning press conference. "He's been very aggressive about handling this and he assured me this is not true." McCain's campaign is pointedly attacking the Times, which last month endorsed the senator. And that always plays well in the conservative community, Perkins says.
"When I speak to social conservatives around the country I tell them I read my Bible daily to see what God has to say about matters of importance," Perkins says, "and then I read the New York Times to see what the other side has to say."
Posted by Ezra at 6:17 PM | Permalink
Regnery on Judges
Human Events interviewed its publisher, Al Regnery, who has written a book of his own on movement conservatism. While everyone on the Right talks about so-called “activist judges”—a political theme going back to southern resistance to the 1954 Brown v. Board decision—not too many writers actually cite Brown or Chief Justice Earl Warren anymore. For Regnery, though, Brown is the first case of “judicial fiat”:
[Al Regnery] But, in terms of the reaction, there have been a lot of things that have been done by the left that didn’t reflect democracy, or republican values -- republican with a small ‘r’ -- which conservatives did react to.
I think case in point is, starting with 1953 with the elevation of Earl Warren, the chief justice in the Supreme Court, the things that the courts have done, by unelected people, which have been moving this country to the left, actually since the Roosevelt administration. That’s been somewhat corrected now, but there is a tendency of judges oftentimes to rule in ways that certainly would not be what the people want them to do. They do that by judicial fiat, and the normal thing of conservatives to do is to get together and react to it one way or another.
[Jed Babbin]: That leads to another point. One of the things, it seems to me, that differentiates between liberals from conservatives is that conservatives are more dedicated to personal freedom. And when you have the courts imposing limitations on those freedoms, conservatives are more apt to react negatively.
AR: Well, that’s true. In a broader sense, conservatives are also, really, more dedicated to the rule of law and due process. And even in cases where the result may not bother people, the way the courts went about it often sends conservatives up the wall. Case in point is, as I point out in the book, is the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1953 and ‘54, desegregating the schools. A lot of people thought, there’s nothing wrong with desegregating the schools, it’s the right thing to do. But what in the world are these nine unelected people in Washington telling us in Texas or Mississippi or wherever it may be how to run our school systems?
What could the federal government and the 14th Amendment have to say about militant segregation? If some states wanted to use police dogs and fire hoses to maintain their system of unequal education for blacks, who are we to judge? That appears to be Regnery’s relativistic question about the Supreme Court’s intervention in Brown. In the vestigial memory of the modern Right, apparently, it still comes down to states’ rights.
Posted by Ezra at 6:15 PM | Permalink
The Right Targets Barack and Michelle Obama – Hitlers in Waiting?
Even though the Republican primary process hasn’t yet come to a close thanks to Mike Huckabee’s stubborn refusal to withdraw and allow the “coronation” of John McCain, some on the Right seem to be looking ahead and preparing for the general election against the presumed Democratic nominee, Barack Obama.
TVC - whose leader, Lou Sheldon, had backed the failed candidacy of Mitt Romney - explains:
[I]t is essential that voters understand exactly what Barack and his wife Michelle believe in – and what they plan for America if elected as President and First Lady.
As more information becomes available about this first-term Senator with no discernible accomplishments in the Senate, the more concerned voters are becoming.
TVC informs us that, in his past, Obama not only had “a Communist mentor,” but also “a socialist mentor” and “a black power mentor.” That would be bad enough, but it is nothing compared to his wife Michelle, who gave what TVC calls a “Hitler-like” speech. TVC declared that the speech contained “frightening authoritarian statements” about how her husband might “rule our nation.”
What scared TVC was this:
Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.
You have to stay at the seat at the table of democracy with a man like Barack Obama not just on Tuesday but in a year from now, in four years from now, in eights years from now, you will have to be engaged.
We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another -- that we cannot measure the greatness of our society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure our greatness by the least of these. That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that. That before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation."
Whether or not you support her husband’s candidacy, Michelle Obama’s speech strikes us as more akin to JFK’s “ask not” speech than to something from a Nuremberg rally. But then the Right has had many years of experience launching scurrilous accusations against Hillary Clinton and her husband, and they’re just getting started on the Obamas - though so far they have managed to allege that he is secretly a Muslim while also saying that his “Christianity [is] woefully deficient,” comparing him to Karl Marx and Fidel Castro while his wife “spits like a cobra” and is plagued by “narcissism.”
But TVC has clearly set a high bar, managing to cite Hitler, Muammar el-Quadaffi, and the communist threat all in one attack piece. Who’s gonna top that?
Posted by Kyle at 4:40 PM | Permalink
Huckabee’s Two-Fer
Amid a heated battle in the Wisconsin primary this week, Mike Huckabee took some time off for a side trip to the Cayman Islands to earn a little money before returning to the campaign trail, only to be summarily trounced by John McCain in the state’s primary.
On the heels of this loss, Huckabee beat a path down to Texas where he is making a last stand, seemingly realizing that if he cannot win there, he might finally be forced to admit defeat and drop out.
But just because Texas represents his last hope to keep his campaign alive doesn’t mean he can afford to pass up an opportunity to head to Colorado to make some money and, more importantly, meet privately with James Dobson:
Despite continuing to battle rival John McCain in his up hill battle for the Republican nomination, Mike Huckabee will be dropping off the campaign trail today to give his second paid speech in a week, Fox News has learned.
The former Arkansas governor will be speaking to the annual retreat for the Colorado-based group, Leadership Program of the Rockies, event organizers tell Fox. Leadership staffers, nor the campaign would reveal the amount he will be paid for the speech. He will also be meeting behind closed doors with Focus on the Family’s Dr. James Dobson, who recently endorsed Huckabee. It will be an informal meeting at the organization’s headquarters in Colorado Springs, according to Dobson aides.
Posted by Kyle at 3:40 PM | Permalink
February 21, 2008
Even Liberty U. Turned off by Clinic Videotaping
Borrowing a page from the Minutemen, anti-abortion protesters in Lynchburg, Virginia are videotaping women at a reproductive health clinic, with the intention of turning them in:
Planned Parenthood, which has centers in Lynchburg, Charlottesville, Roanoke and Blacksburg, called the behavior “intimidating and harassing.” …
“Our signs have a clear message that we’re not using violent means (to express our opinions). We’re opposed to violence,” organizer Kevin Giedd said, referencing the small placards held by participants that read “Pray to End Abortion.” …
At the start of the 40 days, Giedd notified both Planned Parenthood and the Lynchburg Police Department of his plans. He in turn received from the police a copy of the city’s demonstration laws. None of those rules specifically prohibit the videotaping of people, he noted.
Giedd, the most frequent face at the vigil post near the corner of Langhorne and Tate Springs roads, acknowledged he had been videotaping people visiting the center. He had specifically focused on those driving cars with Liberty University stickers, he said, with the intention of turning the tapes over to the school for further investigation.
According to the report from the Lynchburg News & Advance, local police seemed unsure whether Giedd’s vigilante tactics were legal. Interestingly, although the protest is part of the national “40 Days for Life” anti-abortion campaign, the Lynchburg clinic does not provide abortions—only services such as birth control and treatment for STDs.
And although Giedd stated that his intentions were to turn over the tapes to his alma mater, Liberty University—the fundamentalist school with a strict code of behavior that was founded by the late Jerry Falwell—even the college felt he was stepping over the line:
LU administrators said they were unaware of Giedd’s actions and would not look into any tapes that were submitted.
“We have no interest in pursuing some tape dropped into our mail or plopped in our laps of a LU car at Planned Parenthood,” said Barry N. Moore, the vice president of university relations. “We don’t have any interest in tracking down license plates or anything else from things like this.”
Although the violent clinic blockades of the 1980s and 1990s fell out of style after the murders of several abortion providers, the most aggressive anti-abortion activists have hardly given up. Giedd’s “outing” tactics are reminiscent of the efforts by former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline to obtain the medical records of women who visited one clinic. Kline’s obsession resulted in voters turning him out of office, although he continues his efforts as a Johnson County prosecutor.
Posted by Ezra at 4:51 PM | Permalink
Bauer Feels His Pain
As John McCain and his campaign are angrily defending the candidate against the New York Times’ insinuation that he had what some considered an inappropriate relationship with telecom lobbyist Vicki Iseman back in 2000, it seems as if the allegations just might be helping his campaign gain the support of conservatives who don’t like him but hate the New York Times even more.
It remains to be seen how long this “enemy-of-my-enemy” alliance lasts, but McCain can surely count on the continued support of Gary Bauer, who so far appears to be the only Religious Right leader coming to his defense:
And former Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, a McCain supporter, calls The Times report "yellow journalism at its worst."
"That is the cut-and-smear type of journalism that we see more and more in U.S. politics. There's nothing in the story specific; they just leave an impression," says Bauer. "And certainly the lobbyist -- the female lobbyist, in this case -- is not making any allegations about Senator McCain."
According to Bauer, McCain and his wife seemed very calm at the press conference, but they were "obviously angry and disappointed that they would have to go through this."
Several people have come forward with claims of having inappropriate sexual relationships with a number of "headline" liberal candidates, adds Bauer, but The New York Times has chosen not to run those stories. Bauer also notes that in 2004 there was an attempt by CBS News to air a last-minute report suggesting Bush had avoided the draft, yet it turned out to be a complete fabrication for which the network later had to apologize.
Bauer also suggests the report may be an effort by the newspaper to further damage McCain's relationship with some conservative Christians. "Often it seems pretty clear that the real audience is Christian conservatives," he states. "That is, left-wing newspapers will go after conservative politicians in order to undermine them with Christian conservatives."
He recalls that in 2000 -- literally days before the presidential election -- there were reports that George W. Bush had been arrested for drunk driving in New Hampshire years earlier. According to Bauer, subsequent research showed that report cost Bush millions of votes and almost cost him the presidency.
Elsewhere, Bauer suggested that the article, rather than harming the McCain campaign, will ultimately help it:
Gary Bauer, the president of American Values, an Arlington, Virginia-based family advocacy group who has endorsed McCain, said the report has not made him rethink his support.
“Senator McCain and his wife clearly and directly addressed the baseless charges,'' Bauer said in an interview. “People remember other such media efforts against Republican candidates that have proven to be false and this could very well cause a backlash of support for him.''
What “other such media efforts against Republican candidates” do you suppose he is referring to? Perhaps the ones that dogged him back in 1999 when he was running for president? Of course, those reports didn’t create any sort of “backlash of support” for him and he dropped out of the race just a few months later.
Posted by Kyle at 4:20 PM | Permalink
What's Huck Hiding?
Hanna Rosin chronicles her attempts to track down tapes of Mike Huckabee's sermons, only to constantly be assured that while there is "nothing to hide" she won't be allowed to hear them: "Thus began my long-distance treasure hunt in rural Arkansas. Since I did not cover the 1992 Clinton campaign, Arkansas rules are foreign to me. I learned pretty quickly that the pastor is like the drug lord: Everyone protects him, and there's a price to pay if you don't."
Posted by Kyle at 2:27 PM | Permalink
Can Huckabee Endorse McCain?
To hear Mike Huckabee tell it, he is not staying in the presidential race to boost his profile, or out of vanity, or just because he has nothing better to do; it’s because he has principles and convictions that won’t let him step aside and refuses to bow to the "smug, elitist, arrogant attitude" of those in the GOP who feel he should step aside and allow the coronation of John McCain as the nominee. As Huckabee repeatedly states, he is staying in the until McCain has won the 1,191 delegates he needs to lock up the nomination, even though it is mathematically impossible for Huckabee to win the nomination himself and his only hope is for a brokered convention.
While McCain has won the last five Republican primaries by an average of 55% to 29% and continues to inch closer to the magic number, Huckabee continues to insist that he will not drop out,, claiming that he is playing an important role by ensuring that voices of the GOP’s right-wing voters “aren't shut out” and vowing to soldier on so that Republican voters can be given a “choice”:
“One of the questions I get asked everyday…is why do you keep going? And I know that’s a question [to which] people try to come up with their own answers. And some have even suggested the reason I keep going is maybe just some ego trip. Let me assure you,” Huckabee said to reporters, “if it were ego, my ego doesn’t enjoy getting these kind of evenings where we don’t win the primary elections.”
“So, it’s gotta be something other than that, and it is. It’s about convictions, it’s about principles that I dearly, dearly believe in. It’s about believing that the message of pro life – standing firm and unflinchingly for a human life amendment – is an important discussion we must have in our Republican party and frankly must have in our nation.”
…
“We’re going to keep marching on, not just because of nothing else to do, but primarily because there is a message that still needs to be heard in this country, there are people who have a right to vote, there are states who have patiently waited while other states have gone in front of them, and they should have as much of a voice the process of selecting the nominee as have the states that win early.”
Of course, when voters have such a “choice” and continue to “choose” your opponent by overwhelming margins, most politicians see the writing on the wall and drop out. But not Huckabee, who apparently believes that he must remain in the race because McCain is so insufficiently conservative that he is endangering the Republican Party as a whole:
Those principles include giving as many voters as possible the chance to vote for a candidate with positions he feels are at odds with John McCain. “[McCain] does not support for example the human life amendment. He does support human embryonic stem cell research and I know our positions on immigration are significantly different,” listed Huckabee, adding, “doesn’t mean that his positions are bad, it means they’re different, and elections are about choices.”
…
"Not staying in the race hurts the GOP," he said. "It makes it like we're so weak that we can't have a debate and discussion. If this party is so completely incapable of discussing the issues that matter deeply to Republicans, then I'm not its problem. Its problem is that it doesn't have a message that it can run on and it wants to circle the wagons and act like it's all well. It's not all well."
Of course, the GOP is not really having a debate or discussion about these issues at all – Huckabee is talking about them while the McCain campaign is all but ignoring him on his way to winning primary after primary.
So the question remains: if Huckabee needs to stay in the race in order to save the Republican Party from itself and its voters from the dangers of a McCain nomination, will he actually endorse McCain once he has officially secured the nomination?
Undoubtedly he will, since most of this is just self-serving rhetoric designed to make his continue presence in the race seem like a principled stand. But if we are to take his rhetoric at face value, it stands to reason that if Huckabee believes that he must stay in the race because McCain does not represent the Republican Party’s core “principles,” then, as the self-proclaimed representative of those very principles, he would be expected to stand on them and refuse to endorse McCain at all.
Either McCain is so unacceptable a Republican nominee that Huckabee feels he cannot in good conscience simply stand aside (in which case, how could he ever endorse him?) or McCain is a perfectly acceptable candidate that Huckabee will be only too happy to endorse (in which case, why is he still in the race?)
Posted by Kyle at 10:04 AM | Permalink
February 20, 2008
Roy Moore Weighs In
Moore is not happy that the presidential candidates are not talking about the issues he cares about, most notably teh gays: "Driven by political correctness, candidates have likewise failed to discuss moral issues like homosexuality. Content to placate their audiences with vague generalities about the need for strong families and a desire to care for our fellow citizens, they refuse to call attention to the moral decay associated with the glorification of 'alternative lifestyles.' All the while, federal courts allow public schools to teach kindergartners about homosexuality against the wishes of their parents, but prevent Christians in public schools from espousing a biblical view about this immoral behavior."
Posted by Kyle at 5:00 PM | Permalink
The Return of Jim Bakker
Via Sarah Posner we find out that Jim Bakker is back: "This is even more than Jim Bakker promised them. For months they had heard Bakker on his TV show touting his impending move here. Bakker, the disgraced TV minister of PTL-and-Tammy-Faye fame, said the day was coming when he would no longer broadcast his bare-bones show from inside a converted restaurant in nearby Branson, as he had for five years. He talked about moving to a sprawling complex being built for him as the new headquarters for his television ministry, the heart of a 600-acre development named Morningside. Now, on a chilly morning in late January, that day is here. The debut of 'The Jim Bakker Show' from Morningside is one hour away. Visitors pour in. Construction dust floats in the air. Backstage, Bakker waits. His shot at redemption approaches."
Posted by Kyle at 4:42 PM | Permalink
Define 'Freedom' ...
In his state of the union address, President Bush called for a permanent extension of “charitable choice”—no doubt including efforts by his administration to allow faith-based groups receiving federal funding to discriminate in hiring. Reporting on the effort in Congress, the Washington Times quotes an organization taking up Bush’s charge:
A coalition of multidenominational religious groups is fighting to save the language, and the scuffle is complicating efforts in the Senate to renew the SAMHSA [Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration] law. SAMHSA funds and administers a slew of outreach and intervention programs, doling out grants to social service groups that help fight mental illness and addiction. …
"Asking faith-based organizations to ignore religion in making staffing decisions is like asking senators to disregard party affiliation and political ideology in choosing their staff, or requiring the Sierra Club or the Human Rights Campaign to ignore the political and philosophical commitments of potential staff," argued the Coalition to Preserve Religious Freedom in a letter to Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Enzi.
The “Coalition to Preserve Religious Freedom” might sound like an organization that would be outraged when a government-funded program openly refused to hire, say, Catholics or Baptists. After all, the Religious Test clause of the Constitution prohibits the government from requiring officials to be of a certain faith, and civil rights laws protect people from religious employment discrimination at all but private religious institutions. But this group apparently defines “religious freedom” not as an individual liberty but as the right of faith-based groups to discriminate while receiving federal dollars.
In fact, this coalition’s name sounds a lot like that of the Coalition to Preserve Religious Liberty, a group of 50 religious, civil rights, and educational organizations (including PFAW) that formed in the 1990s to oppose efforts to establish state-sponsored prayer and public funding of sectarian schools—quite the opposite of the Coalition to Preserve Religious Freedom.
CPRF is hosted by a group called the Center for Public Justice, and its members include (as of this 2004 document) the National Association of Evangelicals and the Christian Legal Society.
Posted by Ezra at 3:22 PM | Permalink
February 19, 2008
Huckabee’s Future
Over the weekend, Mike Huckabee jaunted off to the Cayman Islands to deliver a speech at the Young Caymanian Leadership Foundation’s awards banquet because … well, he needed the money:
“No taxpayers pay for me to have health insurance, to pay my mortgage, to pay my bills,” Mr. Huckabee said. “And so to me, it’s not just absurd, it’s beyond absurd — it’s insulting — to think that there’s something nefarious about my being here when nobody has raised the question about sitting U.S. senators taking their full paycheck and enjoying all the magnificent perks they get from the U.S. taxpayers.”
Obviously, Huckabee needs to earn money when and where he can, since his only job at the moment is running his long-shot presidential campaign, especially since he thinks that this very campaign just “may be killing my political career.”
Of course, rather than “killing” his career, this quixotic endeavor has actually made his career. After all, had he not run and managed to outlast much bigger names like Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and Rudy Giuliani, nobody would be speculating as to whether he might be tapped to serve as John McCain’s vice-presidential nominee or to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
On top of that, he has built up a large base of right-wing supporters that could easily propel him into a position as one of the nation’s leading, most high-profile Religious Right leaders once the race is over, much as Pat Robertson did following his own run for president.
Far from hurting his political future, Huckabee’s campaign is still out there stumping with figures like Steven Hotze and continuing to rack up support from various right-wing leaders:
"This is Texas," declared Rick Green, a Mike Huckabee supporter. "In Texas, we don't cut and run. In Texas, we don't give up and go home before the fight is over."
…
Although the Huckabee camp has worked to define its candidate more broadly as a tax-cutting economic populist, Monday's supporters made it clear why they were there.
"Protecting life and protecting the family," said the Rev. Steve Washburn, pastor of First Baptist Church of Pflugerville. "We are to vote for the candidate who will best champion this cause of the Lord, this moral cause."
Brent Bullock, who works for a Christian nonprofit group, warned of corrosive "secular humanism and socialist ideologies."
Green works for Wallbuilders along with renowned pseudo-historian David Barton, while Bullock happens to run the America Bless God Campaign of Texas which seeks to “reestablish the Word of God as the moral standard in America”:
America's predominate population of Christians has been influenced by Secular Humanism and contemporary American culture, which has damaged the testimony of the church and the foundations of civil government. We live in an age where each man does what is right in his own eyes, and there is a great struggle over the standards by which we should live. Many lives are being damaged by man's immoral standards. We believe that God's moral standard, as revealed in the Bible, should be the standard we live by; not my standard or yours. Biblical standards, understood in the full contextual interpretation of the Old and New Testaments, provide for a blessed society.
Once his campaign is officially over, Huckabee will find himself well-positioned to join the ranks of high-profile Religious Right leaders such as James Dobson and Tony Perkins, should he so choose. In fact he would probably be quite capable of not only joining them, but outright challenging them considering that the “values voters” they claim to represent have been flocking to his campaign while the leaders have been glaringly slow to embrace him.
As Janet Folger, one of Huckabee’s biggest supporters, put it:
There is something this political race is doing that nobody would have expected. Among conservative and pro-family leadership the sheep are being separated from the shepherds.
There are those in "leadership" in the pro-family movement who follow the pundits, the polls or the politicians instead of leading on principle. I could list them, but, well, you already know who they are. The ones sitting on their hands or convening to the candidate of compromise.
…
There are sheep, and there are shepherds. Sheep follow the pundits, the polls, political expediency and promised perks. Shepherds follow principle. Gov. Mike Huckabee is such a man. So are those who stand on principle with him.
Posted by Kyle at 4:03 PM | Permalink
The Jerry Falwell Parkway
From the News and Advance: "The [Virginia] House of Delegates voted 90-3 Monday to name a section of U.S. 460 in Lynchburg the Jerry Falwell Parkway, which means only the signature of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine is necessary to complete the naming ... the stretch of road covers much of the area where Falwell spent his life, reaching from Thomas Road Baptist Church and Liberty University on the south side of Lynchburg to an area to the east where his ancestors settled 200 years ago and his father’s businesses were located."
Posted by Kyle at 1:32 PM | Permalink