Stay Classy, Mike Huckabee

In case we hadn't figured it out by now, I think it tells us everything we need to know about the soulless planarians who rally under conservatard and/or Republitard banners, that if you heard about a nameless someone mentioning that, under Obamacare, Ted Kennedy would have been told to "go home to take pain pills and die" during his last year of life, most of us would have rattled through at least a dozen or so names before guessing the correct, um, person -- Mike Huckabee.

As it happens, Huckabee made his remarks shortly after he derided Democrats for using Kennedy's death to make the pitch that "Congress must hurry and pass the health care reform bill and do it in his memory,"

"That not only defies good taste," said Huckabee, "it defies logic."

How the hell would he know about either of those things? Good thing Huckabee and his fellow partiers have been vigilant against crass politicization of Kennedy's passing. Good thing also that, per usual, the nearly filibuster-proof Democrats will just pin their legs behind their ears and take it.

True Colors

Looks like the Huckster's got hisse'f some new friends.

A pro-Confederate Flag third-party group is running new radio ads in South Carolina praising Mike Huckabee's pro-state's-rights stance on the flag issue -- and slamming John McCain over his repeated criticism of the controversial symbol.

"Mike Huckabee's stand is a breath of fresh air," say the ads, which are paid for by the Americans for the Preservation of American Culture. "Gov. Huckabee understands that all the average guy with a Confederate Flag on his pickup truck is saying is: He's proud to be a Southerner."

Funny how the most important "right" for the "states' rights" crowd is the right to be a fucking asshole, but whatever. At least everybody knows where everybody stands, and now all them god-botherers know right where their boy Huck's at.

Truthy Versus Facty

So let's see -- Huckabee does not know where Pakistan is, nor has he any clue as to what proportion of our illegal immigrant population Pakistanis constitute. Nor, it appears, does he have even a little bit of insight as to any realistic solutions in that part of the world. (Or hell, this part of the world.)

Which means he'll be a perfect nominee for his party; after all, the current occupant got in not knowing the difference between Slovenia and Slovakia (or Sweden and Switzerland, for that matter), and in fact did not even know Pervez Musharraf's name back in '99/early 2000.

The total, contemptuous disinterest this country's citizens and politicians hold the rest of the world in is creepily complemented by their tiresome insistence that only we can solve their problems for them. It is almost a perfect symbiosis of cognitive dissonance. We don't know shit about the problem, but we're the only ones who can be trusted to fix it, whatever it is.

America has a tiger by the tail in Pakistan. It would help if at least some of our decision-makers and would-bes knew a fucking thing about it, instead of me-tooing each other on how tough they all think they are.