"Wherever the flambeaux of Chautauqua smoked and guttered, and the bilge of idealism ran in the veins, and Baptist pastors dammed the brooks with the sanctified, and men gathered who were weary and heavy laden...there the indefatigable Jennings set up his traps and spread his bait. He knew every country town in the South and West, and he could crowd the most remote of them to suffocation by simply winding his horn. The city proletariat, transiently flustered by him in 1896, quickly penetrated his buncombe and would have no more of him; the cockney gallery jeered him at every Democratic national convention for twenty-five years. But out where the grass grows high, and the horned cattle dream away the lazy afternoons, and men still fear the powers and principalities of the air - out there between the corn-rows he held his old puissance to the end."
Hitchen's infamous CNN eulogy for Jerry's Falwell is the closest recent thing to this sort of urbane and dismissive rejection of political religion. While bigots and fanatics, in their fight against modernity and its imperial detritus, run riot beheading and burning around other parts of the globe, it seems the forces of sanctified absolutism are losing out in our own den of relativism and growing postmodernity. Some would say, not soon enough, but there are earnest voices of dissent. One of those could be Mike Huckabee. It would be grossly unfair, historically dishonest, and factually erroneous to lump him with the worst aspects of reactionary thinking, and its consequences, like ISIS, and the politically correct left should not be quick to try and shut him up. Anyone looking for effective ammunition to use against the threat of another Bush presidential run should welcome any help Mike has to offer.On the whole, Mike Huckabee, like his distant political doppelganger WJB, seems a decent man. He does not want to burn anyone at the stake or cut off their head. He just doesn't like the idea of the Republican Party endorsing (or even accommodating) gay marriage. His religious worldview drives this particular stance, or course, and he dislikes gay marriage so much that he has actually threatened to leave the party and become an independent if the party nominates someone who is ambivalent on this issue. And perhaps run for president?
The prospect seems too good to be true. The threat of someone like Mike Huckabee walking away from the shopworn sham that is the Republican Party, and running as a third choice, has to be the ultimate nightmare stalking Karl Rove's dreamscape. It would be far worse for him and his ilk than, say Rand Paul talking a walk with his libertarians, because HUCK! 2016 would expose the fundamental deception neoconservatism has played on the "values voter" for a near half century.
Huckabee unchained could morph into a 21st century version of Williams Jennings Bryan. The elites who run the GOP of course have always secretly "jeered" at people like Huckabee from the fairways and greens of their members-only country clubs because people like Huckabee actually believe in "family values," but the Chamber of Commerce set loath Huckabee for more than just that. They loath him, and opposed him in 2008 because they realize his earnest belief in the Judeo-Christian worldview they consider simply utilitarian talking points for Flyover Country (and the worldview Huckabee relies on to condemn abortion on demand and gay marriage) also prevents Huck from ever reliably embracing the misused Randian anti-altruism and self-serving social darwinism that informs the material worldview of the speculator class and plutocracy. The business class knows what the political left, which generations ago cast off even a Social Gospel justification for social justice, probably now completely overlooks when it critiques someone like Mike Huckabee.
The media labeled Huckabee a "populist" in 2008 because he talked as much about reining in corporate greed as he did about spiritual revival. A Huckabee no longer moored to the Republican Party would be free to effectively tap the smoldering rift between socially conservative, anti-crony capitalist tea party rank and file, on one side, and the Common Core exploiting, open borders for peonage labor C of C "progressives" such as JEB!, on the other, like no other candidate could.
Will Huckabee run as an independent when nominee JEB! waffles on gay marriage with an "each state can decide" triangulation, or picks Rob Portman to be his running mate? Probably not, but the prospect is interesting. The left considers someone like Huckabee a bigot, but if he walks from the party of Rove, Adelson, Trump, etc., and does his part to prevent Bush 3.0, the word "patriot" seems more appropriate.
Newsmax: Huckabee's Threat Could Damage GOP Chances for 2016
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