Sunday, April 3, 2011

OK, I'm Scared Now

Could Mike Huckabee be our next president? In many ways he seems more palatable than many of the other republican contenders. He is a former governor, and genuinely seems to be a nice guy. He even seems to have some reasonable opinions in some areas. Then he starts in on religion. He openly wants to make the US a theocracy. He thinks the bible should be part of the constitution. Now this is crazy talk, and should be enough to keep him from getting elected. But it could actually help him get nominated. And the republicans have stirred up such a froth of hatred for Obama that some people might well vote for any republican just to vote against Obama.

So this is already pretty scary, but today this item shows up on one of my mailing lists: it is a video in which Mike Huckabee says that Americans should be forced at gunpoint to watch David Barton, a well-known loony-tune who has a book full of false quotes and other material which supports the claim that the US was founded as a Christian country. Now it's clear that Huckabee thinks this is some kind of joke, but at the same time you can sense that he thinks forcible indoctrination would be a good thing, at least where god is concerned.

I'm not going to go into the whole David Barton thing. You'll find lots of links in the article, along with the video itself. My main point is this: does anyone think that this man can get elected president after making a remark like this? They have already removed it from the public copy of his remarks, but do you think they can somehow suppress it completely? If they don't suppress it completely, will the press ignore it?