Huckabee Tells The Truth…
by tristero
and the Times thinks he’s joking:
Speaking to reporters on the flight from Iowa, he mused about strategies that might help him translate his Christian conservative appeal to secular New Hampshire.
“A big tent revival out on the grounds of the Concord State Capitol?” he said, in his deadpan style. “We’ll get them all converted to the evangelical faith, and then we’ll win. How’s that? That would work.”
I don’t find this even the slightest bit funny. Nor do I think Huckabee intended it to be.
Oh? You think it’s obvious Huckabee was just joshing around, poking fun at himself and the reporter’s stereotype of a proselytizing evangelist? Well, here’s an example of another Republican’s charming self-deprecating and disarming deadpan, thoroughly unrevealing of his underlying intentions:
“You don’t get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier.” Describing what it’s like to be governor of Texas.
(Governing Magazine 7/98)— From Paul Begala’s “Is Our Children Learning?”
“I told all four that there are going to be some times where we don’t agree with each other, but that’s OK. If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator,” Bush joked.
— CNN.com, December 18, 2000
“A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there’s no question about it, ” [Bush] said.
— Business Week, July 30, 2001
Anyone today think Bush was just making a silly? That this kind of frivolous humor is unrelated to the signing statements, the secrecy, the unitary executive, the Decider, torture, Guantanamo, the Bush/Iraq war, Schiavo, the Military Commissions Act, and other numerous examples of Bush’s authoritarianism?
Unlike haircuts, sighs, and cackles, things said in jest are often very revealing of character. And once again, a Republican politician is telling the press, and the American public, exactly what is on his mind, and exactly what he intends to do. It might be a good idea if we listened. Because the real joke is not Huckabee’s plan to convert all of New Hampshire to fundamentalist Christianity – he’s quite serious – but rather the extent to which we tolerate the contempt the American media shows for us and our democracy.
[Update: More on the theocon front from Chris Dodda via Kos ]
[Updated after original posting: Added sentence beginning “Unlike haircuts, sighs…”]