Tag Archives: Mike Huckabee

The GOP in Colorado, Out-Played by the Royals.

Posted on by

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterI’m committed to this thing. I swear it. But when the 2015 Republicans debate it’s a tough choice. Baseball or group psychosis? This crowd puts on a show more like “Jersey Shore” without the spray-on tans and tattoos (although who really knows?) than a stale civics class. You know something genuinely weird and over-the-top will happen. It’s practically guaranteed.

So yeah, a guy feels kind of conflicted. On the one hand the World Series (with my second favorite team, the Kansas City Royals). On the other hand, Mike Huckabee and the rest of the scenery-chewing crew? I mention Huckabee, the minister, because he fears that after Barack Obama the country we’ll be leaving to our children will be nothing more than “charred ashes”? So you see the dilemma. Grit and hustle or apocalyptic fantasy? Which will be more entertaining?

The Royals are simply too much fun to watch to spend anything more than commercial breaks with the Republicans, allegedly debating economic policies last night in Boulder. Maybe I just got lucky, though. Because between every inning when I flipped back to CNBC — the business network blistered by Ted Cruz for being another miserable example of running dog liberal loathing of freedom, motherhood and unfettered capitalism — something gloriously nutty was going on.

One time Ben Carson was defending his tax plan, which, being a super-Christian, is really more like a tithe, you see. 10% from everyone. You’re down to your last dollar? The Lord wants a dime. When moderator Becky Quick, who is kind of cute besides being pretty up on her facts, pointed out the multi-trillion dollar debt this alone would ring up, Carson, the scientist who believes in neither evolution or climate change and isn’t an economist either, calmly said that wasn’t true. And besides, he said, his real plan, a flat-tax scheme with no “deductions or loopholes”, would be closer to 15% … which as Quick correctly asserted would still be multi-trillion.

Now, I love a good flat-tax fight. And I think just about everyone other than John Kasich, who decided shouting was the go-to strategy for a Mile High debate, hyped some variation on “cleaning up the tax code”, which of course is TrickleDownSpeak for, “Give Me and My Sugar Daddies More Room to Roam”. (My favorite response to the flat-tax/”no deductions” spiel: How many restaurants — run by “hard-working Americans” — would go out of business the next day if everyone and their dog wasn’t deducting “business lunches” from their returns?)

During another break in the action, with Johnny Cueto mowing down the Mets, I caught Trump being asked about some shot he took at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Naturally, Trump flat-out denied he ever said anything of the sort AND accused the moderator (and by extension all of the press) of making it up. The problem with that being that the quote came off his own website.

At this point in RepublicanLife I’ve waay overworked the image of fact-checkers “melting down”. Gotta come up with something new. But even in snippets between innings, last night’s talk with all those numbers and Carly Fiorina, whose voice produces a strange, twisting contraction in my groin area, still selling the triumph of her Compaq-Hewlett-Packard merger/tenure, smoke had to have been billowing from Google’s search engines. You know thousands scoring at home were furiously looking for how any of the plans hyped put more cash in the pockets of “hard-working” Americans than “Wall Street bankers”.

And, before I cut back to the Royals’ big fifth inning rally, I had to wonder: Was I the only one baffled by the likes of Fiorina (of the $23 million golden parachute fame after laying off 30,000 “hard-working Americans”), Jeb Bush, Cruz and all these other boot-strappers railing against the ruling class? Would someone like to do a search on how many of these populists are either living off either their own family’s tax avoidance scams/investment earnings or those of some Daddy Warbucks puppet master? I mean, (I ask again), “Who buys this act?”

With the Royals in full command I caught one other fascinating moment. It was one where Mike “charred ashes” Huckabee I thought was actually making sense. Somehow he got on to the big drivers of health costs in America, citing diseases, specifically cancer and diabetes (i.e. obesity) and how, by God, we have to do something! So OK, no Republican is ever going to propose anything so French and outrageous as using taxpayer money to fund research to eradicate diseases that kill taxpayers. That would be rank Socialism. But still, as far as he went, Huckabee was actually making a valid point. Maybe the first in his tortured career.

But it was the reaction from the audience that fascinated me. The crowd had cheered wildly when Marco Rubio, (and Lord how I hope he’s the slick and sweaty suit they eventually push forward), took his obligatory shot at the liberal media. “Yeah baby! You tell ’em, Marco! Those bastards always calling us crazy and saying we’re detached from reality! Bias! Don’t tread on me! Watch the contrails! Where’s my gun?” It was like that was what they came for. Screw all this decimal point stuff.

And cancer and diabetes.

To Huckabee’s little speech … nothing. Crickets. “WTF does THAT have to do with the liberal media and Hillary Clinton leaving the USA! USA! USA! in charred ashes? Get back on the bus, man! You’re sounding crazy!”

Which is to say, not crazy enough.

In stark contrast to the Republicans, the Royals are winning because they almost never strike out.

Place Your Bets: Handicapping 2016

Posted on by

Lambert_to_the_Slaughter[Updated]. From the number of pieces I’ve read recently, handicapping the 2016 presidential race has become a click-bait hobby for plenty of allegedly reputable people. So let’s see how it works with a disreputable, unabashed, socialize-all-medicine, raise the tax and fix the damn roads, free community college for all, screw the F-35 and legalize pot liberal.

With Hillary Clinton a given for the Democrats — although god help them if she’s hit by a bus or caught in a love nest with Vladimir Putin, because there is no “Plan B” — I’ll assign a percentage value to the Republican field poised against her. 0% being the most serious candidate, someone likely to beat her, and 100% being a laugher, the equivalent of another Michele Bachmann delusion.

Jeb Bush: 5%. The Republican ruling class actually did a very good job sweeping the worst of the nut cases off their candidate slate last year. (Yes, Joni Ernst won in Iowa.) But there were no witches, no “legitimate rapes” and very little open Tea Bag pandering, at least compared with 2010. This suggests authority –spreading money to local Tea Party captains — is capable of getting Jeb through the primaries without forcing him to wear a tri-corner hat, leggings and ‘rassle snakes at prayer breakfasts. If that’s true, he’s bona fide serious opposition. He certainly more serious and intellectually engaged than his feckless brother. (I seriously doubt we’d have gone to Iraq with Jeb instead of W*, if only because he wouldn’t have laid the “detail stuff” off on Dick Cheney). But I still don’t think he could beat Her Regency. The Democrats have a profound electoral map advantage, the horror of another Bush is just too much for millions of active voters and while Hillary Clinton is hardly anyone’s idea of a “transformational candidate”, the stage is set and lit, with roses in place for a woman.

Scott Walker: 15%. In most ways a textbook example of the ideal Movement Conservative. He’s got that Tim Pawlenty careerist talent of rarely sounding like the pathological narcissist/cynic he is. Despite a Pawlenty-like mismanagement of his state’s economy, laying on massive multi-billion dollar deficit while Minnesota tries to decide what top do with giant surplus, his “go-big” brawl with public unions is all it takes to be hero to … the rubes who aren’t in unions and his industrialist, union-hating benefactors, most notably the Koch brothers. He’s no serious threat top defeat Hillary in a general election, but there’s no question he has the duplicitous wiles to survive a GOP primary campaign.

Rand Paul: 25%. He’s sort of this year’s version of Newt Gingrich. “What dumb people think a smart guy sounds like.” There are college-age wonkers who love his contrarian poses and think tankers who see a guy who’d go out play with their most batshit Ayn Randian theories. But he’s also a little like Joe Biden, in that he’s not big on filters. Over the course of the grind he’ll say at least 20 nutty things that will serve to remind fence-sitters that Hillary at least is a predictable commodity.

Mitt Romney: 40%. Face it. He’s the only Republican with the exception of Jeb, who doesn’t have bury his face in the laps of the Koch Brothers or Sheldon Adelson. He could pay for the race out of his mad money jar. Moreover, he might have learned something about pandering to the loonies in 2012. But, come on. Everywhere outside of a Palm Beach investment bankers luncheon Mitt is still the clueless rich guy, a cartoon who gives no indication that even he knows what he really believes.

Ted Cruz: 60%. Now this guy can do some damage. Not to Hillary. It’d be a landslide in her favor if he ever went mano a mano. But he’s the sort of wholly self-absorbed, unapologetic douche bag who’ll blow off any notion of collegiality and force the Jebs and Mitts to explain why they’re not sending in the Marines to block Obamacare. Frankly, I’m amazed that someone hasn’t dug up a juicy scandal on the Tedster. If ever someone looked like they’re hiding a closet full of perversions, its Cruz.

Marco Rubio: 75%. By now his reputation is locked in concrete. An empty suit. A cutey-pie shill for old money interests without the Clintonesque imagination to make a serviceable case for either pole of the same argument.

Rick Perry: 80%. An even emptier suit than Rubio, even with his new “I must read something because I’m now wearing glasses” look. Worse, for him, Jeb, though associated lately with Florida, is closer to the big, safe-bet Texas money. Still, in terms of pure entertainment, Perry was good stuff on the campaign trail, we’d all love to see him back

Rick Santorum. 90%. Say what you will, Santorum was the hardest working guy in a sweater vest Iowa and the Deep South primaries have ever seen. Lacking Bush and Romney-style money, he has no choice but to pander to the most medieval of the crazies, while reminding everyone else of the guy in high school who no other guy wanted to hang out with. He’s the Republicans’ Harold Stassen, unless Romney wants to fight him for it.

Mike Huckabee: 95%. He’s one of those sweaty, grasping characters who just refuses to go away, clinging to the belief, like Jim Carrey in “Dumber and Dumber”, that “there’s still a chance”. There isn’t. There never has been. Besides there’s more money in slinging stale meat to rubes from FoxNews.

Sarah Palin: 1000%. There’s nothing, short of a long weekend with Sofia Vergara, (sorry, dear), that would delight me more than a Hillary v. Sarah face-off. Michele Bachmann was an opportunistic nut-case sucking up $20 checks from embittered revivalists living on Social Security checks, but Palin is the gold standard for naked pandering, startling stupidity, rank incompetence and non-stop public buffoonery. We are already looking back on her as an icon of the age of celebrity worship. “Does she look good in a form fitting suit? Well then she can be president.” I think John McCain said that.