Two-Buck Huck

After the Rapture - Huckabee's vision of the Red State / Blue State base

by Timothy Egan in the New York Times

The rap against Mike Huckabee, the Baptist preacher and ex-Arkansas governor now doing for the Republican Party establishment what three-alarm chili does for an afternoon nap, is that he’s too inexperienced to be president, too naïve — a rube straight out of Dogpatch.

Few of Huckabee’s critics have actually come out and said what many of them think. The language is coded, as it usually is with class and race in this country. The Wall Street Journal, the anti-tax jihadists at the Club For Growth, the National Review – these pillars of Old School Republicanism have signaled that Huckabee is Not One of Ours. But they’re careful to say it’s not about class, because, of course – it is!

Class war is forbidden in the Republican playbook. But Huckabee, despite an inept last week of campaigning, has forced the Republican party to face the Wal-Mart shoppers that they have long taken advantage of. He’s here. He’s Gomer. And he’s not going away.

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My comment: It's terribly amusing and a little scary to watch the Republican party implode. For years the cynical so-called fiscal conservatives found the religious right to be useful idiots. They were supposed to vote for candidates, not field them. By playing to the religious right's social conservativism, the borrow-and-spend, put-it-on-my-kid's-tab conservatives were able to manipulate the gullible Family Values folks into voting against their own economic interests. For the better part of the last two decades they smiled smugly as the rich got richer at the expense of the poor and the middle class - knowing that God was on their side. But now that they've mainstreamed the religious right, they are reaping the whirlwind. They may have had God on their side at one point - but their being on God's side was never a consideration.

Well, the genie is out of the bottle. Those vast numbers of anti-intellectual creationists, stoked on their bronze age belief system are on the march - and their first target for retribution is the cynical Rovian GOP operatives who thought they could fool all the people all the time. Kiss Mitt and the Kennebunkport crowd with their fake Texas accents and their social-promotion Yale MBAs good-bye.

The problem is that the fundamentalist true believers might just succeed in putting one of their own in power. That would leave us with a hand on the nuclear button guided by a head and a heart that believes in the Rapture - and that they can bring it about. After all, God is on THEIR side and they'd be happy as clams to send the whole planet straight to hell in a handbasket to prove the point.