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Huckabee fights with Arkansas Republicans
Of the problems that conservatives seem to have with Huckabee, it’s that he doesn’t always seems conservative. He’s raised a lot of eyebrows (and won a lot of centrist and even some leftist hearts) with his talk of social justice and his record of spending, and he’s done little to correct those raised eyebrows. Some of us are just afraid that he’ll try to fix things with programs, and cost us money, and make us wonder what we were thinking in electing him. The Wash Times says Huckabee’s been fighting with the Arkansas Republican party for a decade and that a win might mean that he keeps up the fighting as president.
Topic: Campaign 2008, WorldMagBlog
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back to top37 Comments to “Huckabee fights with Arkansas Republicans”
Did I get on to the right site this morning?
I hate to be a told-you-so.
So I won’t.
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He is sort of emerging as a McCain minus the illustrious naval career/hero status.
The real coup would come if the state party chair were to come out and endorse Romney or McC.
That wont happen unless Huck utters something way out there on the Paul/Kucinich magnitude. His handlers and scripters won’t allow that I’m sure.
In his biog, Huckabee points out that when he went from Lt Gov to Gov [due to prior Clintonista crony Tucker's indictmt/resignation] the GOP was minority party in Ark. If the state GOPs fortunes improved is that not due to Huck’s work to change voters??
To win Dems and indeps did Huck have to soft-pedal hard-edged conservatism? Probably so since most southern state govts are notoriously low tax/low public service spending to begin with.
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Does WORLD plan to do another hatchet job/expose on Huckabee as was done on McCain in 2000?
Facts are stubborn things. The American people need to know the true Huckabee facts. The state party men cited in the article should expect WORLD correspondents knocking on their office door time now.
I respect WORLD for its Joe Friday “Just the facts, Ma’am” style of journalism.
Not git after it!
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Secular Republicans won’t care that Huckabee is a statist. Indeed, they probably welcome it (whether they know it or not).
But to Christian Republicans, it should be a big, big concern.
“Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” The overweening State is probably the number one “other god” in contention in America. Huckabee seeks not to limit/reduce government, but to expand its powers and put them to the “right” uses. Thus he contributes to the spread/acceptance of the Statist mentality among believers.
backwaterreport. com/?p=828
(Be sure to delete the space between the “dot” and the “com”.)
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Frank writes: ““Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” The overweening State is probably the number one “other god” in contention in America.”
Frank’s right.
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Frank is right. However, it doesn’t cause me to become a Ron Paul supporter. I’m somewhat despairing about the election now.
Alan Keyes is my top choice, but he obviously won’t win the nomination.
Fred Thompson was my second choice, but he has withdrawn.
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I think the size of government is a reflection of a society’s health. Government tends to be reactive in nature. When a problem develops in society the default response is to expand government to address it. Therefore a sick society requires more government to contain its many problems. It’s a very imperfect solution and often a counterproductive one (elements of the welfare state). But I think its a natural response to social realities and the reason democracies slowly gravitate to socialism.
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You want a hoot? Here is Mitt Romney on MLK Day surrounded by a group of black children saying, “Who let the Dogs out? Who? Who?”
Someone from the audience asked him his favorite sports song, but you don’t hear the question. It’s gives the impression he’s talking about the kids. Nothing like really bad timing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDwwAaVmnf4
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#6: Alan Keyes is my top choice, but he obviously won’t win the nomination.
Nothing like a conservative with real family values. Yea, a real example of parenting. True Christian values.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20005-2005Feb12.html
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I don’t see any bad timing in that Romney clip, RDean. I actually think it’s pretty cool, and it’s only your imagination that he’s referring to the children.
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Let’s see. Mitt Romney walk towards a group of black children on MLK day, puts his arms around a couple of the children and out of the blue, looks at the camera and says, “Who let the dogs out? Who? Who?”
If you didn’t know that someone in the crowd shouted a question out to him, you would see this in an entirely different light. How could you not?
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Well, let’s not forget that any Republican nominated is way, way better than any Socialist the Democrats might put up by far.
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Yea, look at what a great job Bush did.
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I didn’t realize anyone had asked him a question when I first saw that video clip, Donato. It’s something people regularly chant during sports rallies, so it seemed pretty fitting for a political rally as well.
Llama (at post 12): Truer words were never spoken. Donato and others can laugh at President Bush and point out his errors (as even conservatives have done for the past two terms), but what many are forgetting is how much worse off things would have been if a Democrat was in the White House on 9/11 or when SCOTUS appointments were made or when it was time to adjust the taxes in this nation.
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how much worse off things would have been
Well, I suspect if a Democrat had been in office, Bin Laden would be dead instead of sending us home movies. We wouldn’t be in Iraq. We would be rebuilding Afghanistan after routing the Taliban and Al Queda.
Of course we will never know. Istead, we spent a trillion dollars making an new fundamentalist Islamic state in the Middle East. And Bin Laden is sending us home movies. Mission Accomplished!
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Donato (15), you aren’t suggesting that it would have been better to leave Saddam in power, are you? Money, even trillions of dollars, is no substitute for human life. Even though it cost us both financially and with American casualties, who knows how many Iraqi lives we saved?
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Logical:How many Iraqi lives saved???
You’re kidding, aren’t you?
Near as I can tell, 5 years into this miserable affair 15-20 Iraqis are still dying from the violence every day.
And I have seen estimates of Iraqi casualties up to 200,000 dead and Allah knows how many wounded.
All of this with a population roughly equivalent to California’s. What a glorious victory.
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From iraqbodycount.org:
Wednesday 23 January: 49 dead
Baghdad: gunmen kill the dead of dentistry at Baghdad university; 4 bodies.
Ninewa
Mosul: 37 die in explosion that brings down building.
Kirkuk
Dibis: car bomb kills 7, including a child.
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Arcadia,
What happened to your 600,000 dead Iraqis caused byu the US military claim ?
Donato #15,
Try to keep your feet on the ground and head off alien planets
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I’ll confess to flirting a bit with Huckabee for several reasons:
1. He doesn’t come across as an angry Christian in an age when so many conservative Christians come across as angry, negative complainers.
2. He has a sense of humor which gets big bonus points in my book.
3. He seems capable of dealing with popular culture. He’s not afraid to go on shows like “The Colbert Report”.
4. He speaks with empathy toward regular people.
Never-the-less, he’s also got some bad things that far outweigh the good for me. I could never vote for him.
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Outkast if you see Mitt Romney and specifically his actions at the MLK rally as cool then there is truly no hope for you. It was the worst attempt at fitting in/posing I have seen since high school.
Romney just isn’t cool; Huckabee for all his fried squirrel recipes actually pulls it off because he comes across as genuine. I wouldn’t vote for him, I wouldn’t put any money in the collection plate for him, but I probably wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee with him. Romney comes across as a well dressed used car salesman and on his best days a real estate salesman.
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I don’t vote for someone for President because he’s cool, HRW. Maybe you guys do that in Canada, but down here in the U.S. we vote for people who believe like us on the issues and can get things done. Salesman or not, he’s a proven leader.
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Outkast I was referring to your comment;
don’t see any bad timing in that Romney clip, RDean. I actually think it’s pretty cool,
I was not advocating voting for who is cool. And generally most people vote for a variety of reasons; issues, values, looks, party etc., I generally vote on the basis of values and issues. However, if people are honest they would admit that nothing really changed since highschool and no-one votes for the nerd.
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Logical (16): Donato (15), you aren’t suggesting that it would have been better to leave Saddam in power, are you? Money, even trillions of dollars, is no substitute for human life. Even though it cost us both financially and with American casualties, who knows how many Iraqi lives we saved?
Frank: Wow. That’s “logical.”
With reasoning like that, soon you’ll be regurgitating that tried-and-true, modern liberal mantra, “Even if it saved just one life, it was worth it.”
That said, your reasoning overlooks an important issue in the Just War tradition: Lawful Jurisdiction.
Under Just War theory:
A country may go to war to repel an invasion of its borders.
It may go to war to pre-empt an imminent attack.
But it may not aggress against another nation in order to save lives there, when the other country is not threating it.
America’s government has jurisdiction in matters relating to America and Americans, not relating to internal Iraqi matters. And the job of the US military is to defend the United States, not to liberate the oppressed of other nations.
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llama: I suspect you wouldn’t mind if it were 600,000, but I absolutely didn’t make such a claim and I double-dare you to back up your statement that I did.
There seem to be two different approaches to estimating Iraqi casualties–one involves a sort of door-to-door polling and extrapolation from the results and the other involves careful tabulation of officially acknowledged “civilian” casualties. The latter, more conservative methodology comes from iraqbodycount.com or net, and comes up with 80-88,000. The last revision of the poll-driven method, which I saw a month or so ago, came up with something close to 200,000.
Of course then there are the millions of refugees, those who have been informally ethnically cleansed and the general carnage wreaked upon the Iraqi economy…
But hey, they’re only Iraqis, right? And the surge is working, right?
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Yes, it is working. And the Iraqis who are dying are being killed because of the terrorists who are running around. Once we help the Iraqi army become able to weed out the terrorists on their own, the casualty number will go down.
But this thread is about Huckabee, not the War on Terror. What do you think of the fight Huckabee is having with the GOP back in Arkansas, Arcadia?
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Well said, Frank at #24.
Outkast, to anyone under, oh, I don’t know… 35? it was painfully uncool. It was awkward and patronizing.
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#26: are being killed because of the terrorists who are running around
They showed up when we did. You know that right? How can you not?
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No, Donato, I don’t know that. Just because you keep saying it doesn’t make it so.
JJF: So that means the least-likely-to-vote for Romney now think he’s “uncool.” Big deal.
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Then go learn.
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CIA Learned in ‘02 That Bin Laden Had No Iraq Ties, Report Says
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 15, 2006; Page A14
The CIA learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered bin Laden an enemy of the Baghdad regime, according to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report.
Although President Bush and other senior administration officials were at that time regularly linking Hussein to al-Qaeda, the CIA’s highly sensitive intelligence supporting the contrary view was apparently not passed on to the White House or senior Bush policymakers.
Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and two GOP colleagues on the committee disclosed this information for the first time in the panel’s report on Iraq released last week. They wrote in the “additional views” section of the report that the Cabinet-level Iraqi official “said that Iraq has no past, current, or anticipated future contact with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda” and that the official “added that bin Laden was in fact a longtime enemy of Iraq.”
On Sept. 25, 2002, just days after the CIA received the source’s information, President Bush told reporters: “Al-Qaeda hides. Saddam doesn’t, but the danger is, is that they work in concert. The danger is, is that al-Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam’s madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world. . . . [Y]ou can’t distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.”
According to the three Republicans, the CIA said it did not disseminate the intelligence about the lack of a Hussein-bin Laden connection because “it did not provide anything new.”
But other information obtained at the same time from the same source that paralleled what administration officials were saying was immediately passed on to “alert” the president and other senior policymakers, the three Republicans said. A “highly restricted intelligence report” conveyed the source’s claim that although Iraq had no nuclear weapon, Hussein was covertly developing one and had stockpiled chemical weapons, according to the committee members.
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said he could not provide additional information about the situation beyond what is in the Senate report, but he added that “the agency’s decisions to disseminate intelligence are not guided by political considerations.”
Committee staff members would not expand on the report’s language other than to say the Hussein-bin Laden material was maintained within the CIA at a high level with limited access.
Former senior CIA officials said it was unclear what happened to the Hussein-bin Laden information, although two former aides to then-CIA Director George J. Tenet said they could not remember if they received the original information. “Nothing was withheld from the White House,” one former aide said, although there was “a lot of debate inside the agency about the Saddam-al-Qaeda relationship” because it was the focus of repeated questions from administration officials, including Vice President Cheney and his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
The high-level Iraqi official, who was not identified in the Senate report, was Naji Sabri, then foreign minister. A senior CIA officer, after months of trying, was able to question him through a trusted agency intermediary when Sabri was in New York City around Sept. 19, 2002.
According to former intelligence officials, the CIA case officer filed two separate reports describing his questioning of Sabri. One, involving the Iraq weapons program, would go to analysts interested in that subject, the officer believed; the second, about Hussein and bin Laden, would go to the CIA counterterrorism center. The officer, however, passed his material on to senior agency officials in New York and was not aware of how it was eventually distributed.
Sabri’s role as an intelligence source for the CIA has already been publicly reported. New details, including a payment of $200,000 to the intermediary and a secret signal system to assure the CIA officer that Sabri was cooperating, are contained in the recently released book “Hubris,” by Michael Isikoff of Newsweek and David Corn, Washington correspondent for the magazine the Nation.
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Whatever, Donato. Just because a report says that Osama had no connection to Saddam does NOT mean there were no terrorist cells in Iraq at the time.
Spin again.
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Harrison Scott Key wrote – He’s raised a lot of eyebrows (and won a lot of centrist and even some leftist hearts) with his talk of social justice and his record of spending, and he’s done little to correct those raised eyebrows. Some of us are just afraid that he’ll try to fix things with programs, and cost us money, and make us wonder what we were thinking in electing him.
Justus331 – OH…..you were talking about Mike Huckabee?? oooops, my bad, that’s exactly how I feel about my vote for George W. Bush!
He campaigned as a comapssionate conservative. He just might be compassionate, but he ain’t no conservative. Just because he’s got an “R” after his name, it doesn’t make him one. Just look at John McLame.
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#32: Just because a report says that Osama had no connection to Saddam does NOT mean there were no terrorist cells in Iraq at the time.
Why would you think that Sadam, a petty, secular dictator would tolorate a religious fanatical organization in his country? It’s only common sense.
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Outkast,
I don’t know whether RDean is Donato, and frankly I don’t care. But your continuing to call him a name that may or may not have been a previous handle does make discussions hard to follow sometimes. Why not call him what he’s calling himself?
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You and I both know who I’m talking to, Cheryl, and I’m not the only one who refers to RDean as Donato. Therefore, where is the problem?
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BTW, Cheryl, have you noticed that whenever I direct a post to “Donato” RDean is the one who responds? Curious, eh?
People can call me Outkast or Jake or Sarah or Weekenderman or whatever. And they frequently do. That doesn’t confuse me, but maybe that’s just because I don’t get confused very easily.
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