generalspeaking

Calculating Demagoguery

Republican presidential aspirant Mike Huckabee has come up in a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll as the leading contender for the 2012 field of candidates with 26% support. Which makes it all the more puzzling that this normally mild-mannered man has decided to take the low road in pursuing his goal, by casting aspersions that he must surely know are false and misleading.

This formerly rationally dependable man has somehow morphed from an agreeable and knowledgeable and fair one to a no-holds-barred representative of those who cleave to the belief that a conspiracy is afoot to turn their beloved country into an Islamic caliphate. Led by none other than the current President of the United States.

Who, his detractors would have it, is a closet Muslim born abroad in an Islamic country which would render him by birth legally constrained from that high office to begin with. One who, furthermore, was educated abroad in a series of madrassas, religious schools dedicated to teaching the Koran extensively, exhaustively, in Arabic, to the detriment of any other subjects of civil society.

The poisonous ideology of the conspiracy theorists has been taken up with resolute enthusiasm, it would appear, by someone who stands so prepared to surrender principle to opportunity that he has now eschewed his former persona for one that dribbles innuendo in public and well-televised arenas of political discussion.

He has succumbed to this new tack as a matter of personal and political expediency, to endear himself with the leading religious right in the Republican party.

"The polling data shows that the Americans who are most inclined to believe that Obama is not a genuine Christian, that he is either a Muslim or something else, are very heavily the conservative evangelicals in the core of the Republican party." Mark Rozell, political scientist, George Mason University in Virginia

Mr. Huckabee, now that he has surrendered his principles, infers at every public opportunity that his president is not who he purports to be. He confuses geography, time lines and circumstances, but when called for correction claims to have been misquoted, criticizing the media he is relying upon to get his message through, of making too much of a "slip of the tongue".

It takes raw ambition and a willingness to pose convincingly as a political Mountebank to forge ahead in that direction. He seems more than willing - determined actually - to help spread the vicious rumours that Barack Obama is not a true American, nor a true Christian. Attempting to sound the death knell for prospects of President Obama's future re-election potential.

As it is, 18% of Americans in the general population believe those slanders, and 34% of Republicans in particular subscribe to them passionately.

"I do think he has a different world view and I think it is, in part, moulded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas". Mike Huckabee

Furthermore, we have it on unimpeachable authority that Barack Obama detests and will not soil his palate with apple pie.

Labels: Human Fallibility, Political Realities, United States

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, March 05, 2011