Don't Get Me Started
That comment got the most likes of anything else I have written on Facebook up to this point. Is that sad? Hard to say.
Mike Huckabee is a vile, amoral religious fanatic who if given half a chance would turn America into a militant theocracy the likes of which make Iran seem like French Socialism.
facebook.com/Stonekettle
The last political piece I wrote for this blog was titled Pharisee vs. Christian and it was about the Kim Davis farce that continues to play out in Kentucky.
I’ve apparently pissed off some people on this subject. Not the religious people that the wife said would firebomb us for the title; no those people really can’t seem to care one way or the other (as I’ve noted over most of my life, the vast majority of people who identify as christian are reasonable, sane, and capable of rational discussion even on the subject of religion. There are exceptions as there are in any group) no, the group that I appear to have pissed off is Democrats.
Why? Well, Kim Davis is a Democrat.
The most frequent response I get from this observation is that conservatives can be Democrats, stated in a voice that seems to drip with disdain for requiring them to state the obvious. This isn’t news to me, nor is it the point that I’m trying to make when I bring this fact up, although I could have worded my initial comment more clearly.
Specifically the fracas emerged on a Facebook post on Jim Wright’s wall. Jim rightly notes that the comparison that Huckabee is making (go to the link and read about it, I don’t care enough to even try to summarize it) really doesn’t hold water for various reasons; mostly because Huckabee is a grandstanding buffoon competing with Donald Trump for air time. Huckabee and Ted Cruz (another buffoon) are now embracing Kim Davis as their poster child for the persecution of christians. But I’d still like to point out to these two Republican Presidential hopefuls that they are defending a Democrat as being the best example of conservative christian in office.
A Democrat. A Democrat who refuses to do her job.
Now, I’ve been active in political circles for a long time. There was a time when fraternizing with the opposition was commonplace, but that was before Newt Gingrich and the birth of FOX news. These days having anything nice to say about a Democrat spells disaster for conservatives who are trying to out-conservative all the other conservatives. To this day the most telling criticism that can be leveled by conservatives at fellow conservative Governor Chris Christie is that he hugged President Obama. His hand in costing the state of New Jersey uncounted man-hours with the George Washington Bridge fiasco barely registers outside his own state. Now these two buffoons are hugging a Democrat on national television.
This Democrat might be conservative, I don’t know. She hasn’t changed her party affiliation, something that former Democrat and former Governor Rick Perry can tell you is easy to do. So her claim to be conservative doesn’t equate to her huggability as a Republican by other Republicans. She is demonstrably not acting in a christian manner, so I doubt very much that she really qualifies as a christian. She is acting in a way that the homo-obsessed religious-right lead GOP embraces, I get that part of the equation. Homophobia equals conservative in that light, if conservatives want to go there that is their business. If the GOP wants to endorse homophobia as a plank in their party platform, more power to them.
But what will this little farce look like in a year, a month before the 2016 elections? That really is the question. What will the optics be in the rear-view mirror? I imagine that neither of these two will be on the dais debating whoever the Democrats end up nominating, but just how will the GOP attract votes from any group outside of the aging white demographic of the religious right when they’ve gone out of their way to embrace lawlessness, racism and homophobia all in the space of the campaign for selecting their nominee?
November 9, 2018 – Neither Huckabee nor Cruz were ultimately the nominees for the Republican party in 2016 in spite of all the demagoguery and pandering. They were apparently too sane to make the cut. We got the Orange Hate-Monkey instead. Kim Davis switched to the Republican party and ran for reelection this year. So at least the headline Huckabee, Cruz Embrace a Republican Official can now be substituted for what actually happened that day in 2015.
However, Kim Davis lost her reelection bid. The gay man who was refused a marriage license by Kim Davis was not the candidate that defeated her, unfortunately; although he did run as a Democrat in the primaries this year. That would have been a priceless bit of news. But he lost to the same challenger that faced off against Davis previously and lost, when she was also running as a Democrat. This time the Democrat won, again. Hooray for partisan loyalty? I guess so. Let’s see if he’s a better human being than Kim Davis was when she was a Democrat holding that office. It would be hard to be worse.
Examples of why Huckabee is indeed the true religious fruitcake. He wants to change the constitution to bring it more in line with god’s teachings. You get the award Mr. Huckabee. (at least he’s now trailing in the polls. That’s a relief) Discussion of who and what Gideons are, and the latest decision against giving bibles to school children (I have one of those bibles myself. I prefer the Catholic version; more books) Gideon warning label. The former Cardinal Ratzenberger’s continuing war on science. The Misogynist nature of the Bible.
Katha Pollitt‘s third (?) appearance on the show, discussing her latest book Learning to Drive. Always entertaining.
January 20, 2007 –
The least interesting interview to date, Matthew Rothschild. One of the favorite phrases on Freethought Radio is “Beware of Dogma”; and if there is one thing that qualifies as dogma, it’s progressives embracing policies and practices that have been proven to harm those they are intended to help.
Such is Mr. Rothschild’s allegiance to the minimum wage, and his shocked condemnation of those who are opposed to it as conservatives. There are many people who are opposed to stealing jobs and money from the poor in order to aid those middle class workers who are union members (the true benefactors of a minimum wage hike) Fiscal conservatives are just part of that group, and very few of them are in evidence in the legislature these days.
That they let him rant on about the lack of ethics of those who would oppose the minimum wage is suspect here, but I’ll let it slide this once. I’ll not be paying much heed to what Mr. Rothschild has to say in future.
I have not checked links that go other places including the links to the podcast episodes themselves. My Libertarian freak flag was flying high that day in 2008, completely unafraid that my Dunning-Kruger undergarments might be showing in the process. Just another instance where relying on CATO for information lead me to the wrong conclusions.
One man’s dogma is another man’s ideology.
