John Batchelor not a big Huckabee fan

Mike Huckabee is an ambitious and craven Republican politician who will do exactly what he must to exploit his effectiveness in the weakest parts of the GOP—the bullying evangelicals, the cloying faux-Confederate vote, and the cynical elitists like Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh, whom I think of as Republican zombies. Mike Huckabee, 54, is no one’s idea of a well-educated citizen. As a youth, Huckabee was a Baptist pastor in Arkansas—mostly as a platform to exhibit his hambone one-liners on cable channels—and he wears this fleeting experience like a Harry Potter invisibility cloak to cover up his incuriosity of the world, the flesh and the Devil. That he performed notably at all in 2008 is not a credit to Huckabee but rather a verdict on the mortification of a party that was left without more than John McCain’s worn stubbornness and Mitt Romney’s deaf arrogance, and that today enjoys no stronger field, staring at the exuberant glamor of Sarah Palin and the leaden Sam’s Club marketing of Tim Pawlenty to add to Romney warmed over like cold liver…

Huckabee travelled to Jerusalem this past summer to secure another base for his political future; he was the guest of the Jewish Reclamation Project that seeks to move Jews into the historical Arab quarter of the Old City. Dubbed “Huckabee the Macabee” by his hosts, Huckabee spent two days snacking on a local favorite, shawarma (turkey and honey) and offering vaguely incoherent anachronisms, “…if you’ve studied the Bible you certainly understand this conflict didn’t start in the 1940s. It started with Isaac and Ishmael.” Huckabee was introduced to the significant players and generally treated as a VIP despite the discomfort of his hosts that he lacks curiosity about the conflict with Hamas, Hezballah and the Al-Aqsa Brigades. “He doesn’t know anything,” was one close observer’s summary. What Huckabee does know is how to cash in on his pleasing vacuity; and he accepted what are reported to have been substantial checks. The lone partisan significance of the cop-killer episode is that Huckabee’s largest donors in Israel now regard him as extremely unlikely as a candidate who can be trusted to make choices between the Devil and common sense.