Dean Barnett in the Weekly Standard continues the intellectual irreligious right’s jihad against Mike Huckabee today, following in the foosteps of his editor, Rich Lowry, and Ann Coulter at the malappropriately named Human Events.
For my money, Barnett is the clear winner in this kneecapping derby, with an entry aimed at Huckabee’s essay in Foreign Affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations house organ that has become an obligatory platform for presidential candidates.
Apparently sensing the sobriety of the occasion, Huckabee chose to write the essay under the handle “Michael D. Huckabee” rather than the more familiar and colloquial “Mike.”
The essay was a disaster for both Michael D. Huckabee and Mike Huckabee. Their bid to persuade America’s most serious foreign policy analysts that Huckabee understands global affairs was equal parts embarrassing and unintentionally comic. In one part of the essay, Huckabee somberly intoned that “Sun-tzu’s ancient wisdom is relevant today: ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’” The only problem with citing this ancient piece of wisdom is that it comes not from Sun Tzu, but Michael Corleone. Unfortunately, the rest of Huckabee’s essay was silent as to what America should do about Hyman Roth and his Sicilian message [sic] boy, Johnny Ola.
Oh, ow.
Barnett could have stopped there, and should have; the rest of the piece isn’t up to that standard, and it ends where Lowry began, lamenting that a Huckabee win would represent the triumph of a GOP constituency, the religious right, that is viewed by the GOP intelligentsia, if we can call them that, as a weapon to be trotted out for elections resulting in victory for more presentable candidates, and then stowed safely out of sight until the next cycle.
The irony is that these are the same guys who spent most of the past seven years fluffing George Bush, whose capacity for mangling facts, references, and indeed, foreign policy, is unparalleled, and blaming his missteps on his advisors. Bush didn’t participate in the Foreign Affairs rite of passage but one can fairly well imagine, based upon his performance in the candidate debates with Gore, what a 1999 Bush FA essay would have looked like were he allowed to write it himself.
UPDATE: Daniel Drenzer got in on Michael Corleone fun first, with a post entitled “Every time I think I’m out, Foreign Affairs pulls me back in“.
Oh, rounding up those AIDS pukes was MY idea! I also told that pudgy little fuck where to hide – it’s not MY fault that he’s so stupid he can’t even pass SEMINARY. He kept cleaning out my refrigerator too – that’s why I took away his appetite. He can’t do ANYTHING without My help. The dog wasn’t MY idea though – the Huckster trained all his children that way. The way I see it, if I can get voters to only vote for their religion, can WW4 be far away? And with a Know-nothing like Huckabee in office, getting him to start Armageddon will be as simple as telling him Islamic folk are EVIL – and he already believes that!
Cordially,
Satan –> Bringing you political leader for the best part of a decade!
But you missed the best part: “When we let bin Laden escape at Tora Bora,” Huckabee reminisced, “we played Brer Fox to his Brer Rabbit.” At the risk of revealing my lack of bumpkin bona fides, I don’t know what that’s even supposed to mean.
The Weekly Standard is publishing Great Thinkers who have never heard of Uncle Remus, and have no idea of what “don’t throw me into that brier patch” means; in short, the functionally illiterate.
[...] unwise to continue the assault begun by Ann Coulter, Rich Lowry and others from the dope-smoking urban smartass wing of the [...]