On Jan 30, 11:43 pm, johac <jhachm...@remove.sbcglobal.net> wrote:

The more I read about this guy, the kookier he gets. Fortunately, it
looks like won't be his party's nominee and should be dropping out soon.

Don't count your chickens, and all that. There's a certain amount of
buzz indicating that if Huckabee were to drop out of the race and
endorse McCain, that McCain would tap him for the VP spot on the
ticket - which would help McCain get votes in the deep south, where
he's weakest.

Brenda Nelson, A.A.#34
EAC Professor of Feline Thermometrics and Cat-Herding
skyeyes nine at cox dot net

On Jan 30, 11:43 pm, johac <jhachm...@remove.sbcglobal.net> wrote:

The more I read about this guy, the kookier he gets. Fortunately, it
looks like won't be his party's nominee and should be dropping out soon.

Don't count your chickens, and all that. There's a certain amount of
buzz indicating that if Huckabee were to drop out of the race and
endorse McCain, that McCain would tap him for the VP spot on the
ticket - which would help McCain get votes in the deep south, where
he's weakest.

On Jan 30, 11:43 pm, johac <jhachm...@remove.sbcglobal.net> wrote:

The more I read about this guy, the kookier he gets. Fortunately, it
looks like won't be his party's nominee and should be dropping out soon.

Don't count your chickens, and all that. There's a certain amount of
buzz indicating that if Huckabee were to drop out of the race and
endorse McCain, that McCain would tap him for the VP spot on the
ticket - which would help McCain get votes in the deep south, where
he's weakest.

On Wed, 30 Jan 2008 22:43:26 -0800, johac
<jhachmann@remove.sbcglobal.net> wrote:

The more I read about this guy, the kookier he gets. Fortunately, it
looks like won't be his party's nominee and should be dropping out soon.

---
Huckabee's Biblical Madness: Dispatches from the War on Stupidity

By Larry Beinhart, AlterNet
Posted on January 30, 2008, Printed on January 30, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/75363/

Mike Huckabee has made a set of controversial statements about the
Constitution (amendable), and the Word of God (not-amendable).

It aroused a fair amount of controversy. Which was good. But all of it
missed the real point. The real point, or what should be the real point,
is that almost every phrase in his statements was factually untrue.

Whether you're a person of faith or a secularist, or trying to balance
the two, the discussion should be based on reality, not fantasies or
myth-making. Furthermore, failure to confront the falsehoods helps
perpetuate our life in a world of nonsense.

Here's what he said.

I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the
Constitution. But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution
than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that's what
we need to do, 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.

He later expanded on that in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

Huckabee: Well, what I'm simply saying, we've changed the
Constitution 27 times in 221 years. But the Ten Commandments are still
the Ten Commandments. We haven't added or subtracted any of them, and
that's my point, is that the Constitution was created with the
understanding that it could be changed, we could make changes. ...

Blitzer: But the criticism is you, in effect, would want to amend
the Constitution based on the Bible. Is that right?

Huckabee: Well, it's really based on the idea that we've always had
a historical understanding that life is precious. We go all the way back
to the Declaration of Independence, when the founders made it very clear
that all of us are equal. And equality wasn't based on the point of our
viability. It wasn't based on our net worth, our personal assets, or
ancestry. At the heart of the pro-life movement is the idea of intrinsic
worth in value.

Marriage has only meant one thing in all of our historical settings.
It's only meant one man/one woman. When someone wants to change that,
what we're looking for is an amendment to say let's affirm, not change
the definition of marriage. Let's affirm the definition we have, because
some states are trying to change it, creating a huge mess for whether or
not another state would have to recognize what one state did. And, in
fact, why I think we need the constitutional amendment.

In actuality, it's far harder to amend the Constitution than the Word of
God. Amending the Constitution is a difficult and arduous process.
Amending the Word of God is quite easy. Any preacher (like Mr.
Huckabee), a Pope, a self proclaimed new prophet, even a mere pundit,
can come along and say, "This is actually the word of God! Not that old
stuff you used to believe!"

Indeed, it happens in the Bible itself, over and over again. It's a big
problem for the Western monotheistic tradition. Catholics solved it by
not having ordinary people read the Bible for themselves (one of the
primary issues of the Protestant Reformation) and having a hierarchy of
priests, led by a Pope, to do the reading and then telling people what
it means.

Protestants have tried to solve it by developing a whole school of
theology called Dispensationalism. It is that God has "dispensed" his
wisdom in constantly changing chunks as mankind was prepared to
understand them, and it's our collective fault that He didn't set it out
clearly the first time.

Islam took the view that the Jews and Christians had corrupted the texts
and so God sent Gabriel to Mohammed with a final set of revisions.
Joseph Smith was visited by God and Jesus Christ, who told him more or
less the same thing (except the bit about Mohammed). Then the Angel
Moroni told him where some golden tablets with a different set of
revisions written by a guy named Mormon were buried. Smith dug them up.
They were in "reformed Egyptian." He translated them, then gave them
back to Angel Moroni.

Huckabee says " the Ten Commandments are still the Ten Commandments."
Let us leave aside the facts that there are three different versions of
the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament and the only one so labeled
bears little resemblance to the one usually referred to by that name,
and that Protestants, Jews, and Catholics each use a slightly different
set of even that one.

The reality is that virtually all contemporary Christian and Jewish
groups have amended them. And that any group that tried to enforce them,
in the manner called for in the Bible, would be subject to arrest.

The Second Commandment begins: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven
image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is
in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth ...:"

This clearly forbids all paintings and statues of Jesus (let alone of
anything else). It is worth noting that the Catholics simply removed
this Commandment from the list and split up the last one into two parts
so that they still had ten. It is only taken seriously in Islam, which
is why Islamic art contains only designs and calligraphy and why the
Taliban (quite correctly, by Biblical injunction) destroyed the giant
statues of the Buddha.

But for the most part, this has been simply, and quietly amended. By
ignoring it.

The Bible calls for the death penalty for violations of the 4th (keeping
the Sabbath), the 5th (honoring your Mother & Father, or more precisely
for cursing them), and the 7th (committing adultery.) The Bible adds
that "everyone who divorces his wife, except for the cause of
fornication, makes her an adulteress, and anyone who marries a divorced
woman commits adultery."

Obviously, enforcing those penalties would end Christianity as a
cultural force in America, as there would be so few of them left. The
Tenth Commandment, the one about "coveting," criminalizes thought. Any
attempt to enforce it (aside from violating the fundamentals of American
law), would remove all the Christians and Jews who were left after the
executions required by enforcement of #4, #5, and #7, except for those
in a vegetative state.

The Bible is amended far more often, far more casually, with far less
debate, than amending the Constitution.

Huckabee's goal is two amendments to the Constitution. One would ban
abortion. There is nothing in the Bible that directly forbids abortion.
Not a word. Not a jot. So he does a shuffle and slide and he says:

Well, it's really based on the idea that we've always had a
historical understanding that life is precious.

We go all the way back to the Declaration of Independence, when the
founders made it very clear that all of us are equal. And equality
wasn't based on the point of our viability. It wasn't based on our net
worth, our personal assets, or ancestry. At the heart of the pro-life
movement is the idea of intrinsic worth in value.

In fact, voting was restricted to white males, and normally, only those
white males with a certain amount of personal assets. The historical
truth is exactly the opposite of what Huckabee claims.

The second would define marriage as "a union between one man and one
woman." Nothing in the Bible says that. Based on the examples found in
the Bible the rule would more accurately be described as "Marriage is a
union between one man and as many women as he can get in the prevailing
social climate."

This is not meant as an attack on Mr. Huckabee. Compared to the crowd
he's running against, and within the limits of Republican ideology, many
of his foreign and domestic policy positions are sane and humane.

The point is that in our public debates the Right Wing postulates
certain myths, the mainstream media repeats them, or nods along as if
they're not full of obvious untruths, and while the Left may howl in
outrage, fails to point out the factual errors and then drive them home.
Truly stupid policies can only stand on a foundation of falsehoods.

---
http://www.alternet.org/stories/75363/

Can't snip a word of that.
Excellent.

atheist@home#1554