The GOP Field

The New York Times today had a nice long article about how Giuliani was a beastly fascist toad as Mayor of New York, who delighted time and again in deploying the full powers of his station to settle ludicrously petty disputes with people much less powerful than him. At this point his standing at the polls is substantially lower than Ron Paul so we can basically write him off and declare his political career at an end. He will retreat back to the swamps whence he came and probably only venture back out to collect $100,000 per appearance speaking fees or maybe write a bestselling book about what a great leader he is. I'm a little sad to see Rudy fade away, though, because he represented the closest thing to Heinrich Himmler in American politics, i.e. a goofy Nazi thug with bad hair and an oddly shaped skull.

A while ago as well, Huckabee got people good and riled by saying

"What we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards, rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family."

which honestly shouldn't have surprised anybody. I actually admire him just a little bit for his daring, because here in America we like to pretend that the Founding Fathers were just splendid and the Constitution is perfect. People ought to spend less time polishing George Washington's shoes and more time thinking about what the Constitution and the laws of the land can really do for us today. I mean, we're talking about people who drank gin for breakfast, had sex with their slaves, and bathed twice a year. The best of them, Benjamin Franklin, electrocuted turkeys for fun. How much do they really have to tell us about how we should lead our lives, apart from Enlightenment principles which they stole from the French anyway? The Constitution is a fine basis to work from, and it has worked reasonably well in the past 140 years (I refuse to regard the history of the Constitution prior to Amendment XIII with anything but friendly contempt), but let's not pretend it was handed down by God or anything.

Of course, Huckabee goes completely the wrong direction with his idea. But this is to be expected from his sort of man. Huck is not a fan of the Enlightenment, if indeed he has any idea what it is. He is not a fan of the Scientific Revolution, either. I think he probably has some respect for the Protestant Reformation being as it is the conceptual basis of his liberation from Papism, but I'm sure he doesn't much hold with anything that's happened since then. I'm not calling him stupid, as stupid people don't become successful ministers and governors of whole states. Ignorant is a better word.

Fred Thompson dropped out of the race recently, so... so what? Who cares? Maybe his wife. I had some things to say about him on this blog way back when, but it doesn't matter now.

Ron Paul I might talk about in a later post, because I'd want to devote an entire post to him, as he's quite a loon. The internet is a great place for terrible ideas like Libertarianism, they can fail in practice and fail in the court of public opinion, but get a second chance in the modern equivalent of 19th Century New York's "burned over district".

John McCain has emerged from the early campaign knife-fights to look like some kind of front runner, though that's probably just the favorable media coverage (the media wuvs McCain) talking and he's neck and neck with Romney, at best. I'd say he's probably the best GOP candidate, because he's got the best to win the general election and he seems less likely that Romney or Huckabee to run the country even further into the ground once in office. However, he's still phony as all get out. It's embarrassing and infuriating that the press continues to pretend he is a maverick. He might have been, in 2000, but he gave all that up after the drubbing he got in that campaign, and has spent the last eight years trying to be a good soldier. He hasn't convinced the media... nor the GOP bosses. The Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, baby-eating troglodytes that run the party from the smoky back-rooms hate his guts, and this will be his greatest weakness.

My money is on Romney. He is made of plastic, has no actual positions or beliefs, and if you squint hard enough in low-light conditions he kind of looks like Ronald Reagan. He also has the support of the party elite, which counts for everything in the GOP, probably to the extent of making his coronation a near inevitability. But maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, because I think Romney is the very worst choice in the entire rogues' gallery. He's a Mormon with extremely weak credentials on abortion, so he'll drive many of the evangelicals away from the polls, and generally speaking he's got no personality or creativity. He'll be beaten savagely, like a cur, in November.