Why I don't 'Like Mike'

By now Mike Huckabee has proven himself to be an utter fraud, a complete charlatan.

He was "for negative attack ads before he was against them".

He has despicably played the 'religion card' against Romney and is playing, as Rush Limbaugh calls, 'identity politics' to the highest degree.

His shamelessly populist rhetoric has been, at this point, vetted and analyzed to be the thinly veiled liberal philosophy that it is.

His main criticism of Romney, the amount of money Romney has spent in Iowa, is classic liberal backwards logic. The Huckabee campaign would have us believe that being able to raise money and run a well-organized campaign is a bad thing. What does the Huckabee campaign imagine is a good approach to beating say, Hillary Clinton I wonder? That running a campaign "out of your back pocket", as Rich Lowry calls it, is somehow a viable way to defeat the entrenched Democratic apparatus? This kind of John Edwards-esque backwards logic is what we can expect from the other side of aisle, which represents yet more evidence that Huckabee is a RINO.

Pastor Huckabee has bungled every single opportunity to prove he knows a thing about foreign policy. Even his most ardent supporters would concede that, as Huckabee himself would probably quip, that his foreign policy experience amounts to that he has twice eaten at the International House of Pancakes.* He actually did say something like “I may not know a thing about Pakistan, but I did stay at a Holiday inn Express last night.” Sorry Mike, we are not electing a comedian-in-chief, we would prefer that our candidate at least know that illegal immigrants from Pakistan do not outnumber those from all other countries but Mexico.

That I haven't heard more about his completely inappropriate responses to the so-called negative ads that Romney has been running is somewhat puzzling to me. Huckabee has vindictively whined about the Romney campaign contrast ads running on TV in Iowa and elsewhere. The ads, which stay miles away from any personal attacks, highlight the substantive differences between the two candidates. Claiming that he is running a positive campaign, Huckabee counter attacks Romney about the ads with all the pettiness and vitriol of a classic Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi anti-Bush rant, yet never does he address the substance of what Romney is saying. Does anyone still fall for this kind of obfuscating, smoke screening defense? I'll make it very simple. If candidate A makes a charge against the record of candidate B, candidate B when addressing the charge, should do so squarely. Save the one-liners, the folksy quips, the homespun logic, and the personal attacks, just address the direct subject at hand. Such as, do you support in-state tuition for illegal immigrants under any circumstances or not? Or, did you grant pardons to X number of violent criminals while governor or not? I have to believe that I'm not one of the only people to notice that for all the caterwauling regarding Romney's ads, never does the Huckster address the substance of the ads.

I could go on for days about Huckabee and why he is a fraud but I just hope he does not win Iowa tonight.

Like Susan Estrich, all those who want Republicans to lose in ‘08 want Huckabee to finish first place in Iowa.

*credit, Jay Severin