The US Republican Party isn’t just being kept in power by the military industrial complex, it’s being kept in power by satirists — what would they do without Bush, Huckabee or McCain?
Last week Mitt Romney withdrew from the Republican race to replace George Bush as US President. Romney, who has a way of tightening his mouth and blinking his eyes as though he wants to cry, even when he is happy, has done his best to put the war with Iraq and perhaps even Iran at the centre of the US election.
He’s left the Republican race to two men, one a guitar-playing Baptist preacher who has a band called Capital Offence. Mick Huckabee believes the world was created 3 000 years ago. One of the proud achievements he mentions as governor of the same state Bill Clinton governed is giving Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards a pardon.
Richards was lucky because Huckabee is more inclined to execute than pardon. Even Christ, he believes, is in favour of the death penalty. He famously said: “Interestingly enough, if there was ever an occasion for someone to have argued against the death penalty, I think Jesus could have done so on the cross and said, ‘This is an unjust punishment and I deserve clemency’.”
So now you know, Christ died not for our sins but to support executions.
Huckabee, like most of the religious right in the US, sees no contradiction between supporting the death penalty and bombing abortion clinics.
His website tells us that “Governor Huckabee believes that a constitutional amendment is necessary to ensure that every human being, from the moment of conception to natural death, is not denied equal protection of the law.”
Natural death, not those of you who happen to be at the wrong end of a rifle toted by those gun-loving folk Huckabee supports, or at the sharp end of a lethal injection.
Huckabee is such a good family man that his website notes that he and his wife are “proud parents of three children: John Mark, David and Sarah and dogs, Jet, Sonic and Toby.”
This is a man who is not afraid of America going to the dogs — in fact, he probably thinks it would be a good thing. His website tells us that he talks to “the Boys, his dogs, and acts as though they are listening”.
Yep, and you thought it a problem that George Bush read a story about a goat while holding the book upside down to school children after the World Trade Centre had been attacked.
But dogs across America probably retired to their kennels with some satisfaction after Romney stepped down — he famously once drove to Canada with the family dog, Seamus, an Irish setter, strapped to the roof of the car.
Huckabee also believes that there is no such thing as evolution; he belongs to a sect of the US right wing that demonstrates, using a jar of peanut butter, that evolution could not have happened. It doesn’t matter that God doesn’t make peanut butter, heck, why let facts ruin a great myth?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZFG5PKw504
After you’ve paid serious attention to that have a look at one of Huckabee’s presidential promotion videos with his greatest fan, B-grade television actor Chuck Norris — I have a dim memory of him as a guy in tight jeans in a home-renovation show.
South African politicians are such a dull bunch compared to this.
One of the things that most presidential candidates do is write a book. Barack Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope is on the top five of book lists across the world. John McCain, that other Republican presidential hopeful — more about him later — also wrote a best-selling book before his failed presidential bid in 2000.
Huckabee’s two books have not done as well. Strange that. Huckabee’s first book is From Hope to Higher Ground: 12 Stops to Restoring America’s Greatness. Yes, it’s Stops not Steps, can’t have the book sounding too much like an alcoholics bible. His latest book, Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork features on no top-selling lists.
Here are a few more points Huckabee’s family tell us about him (I’ve left in their spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors):
1. “He narrated the Doctor Suess book, Horton Hatches An Egg in a high school play.
2. He’s a big fan of The Three Stooges.
3. He likes Yarnell’s guilt free ice cream.
4. He’s like a kid at Christmas because he wants to open Christmas gifts early just so he can see what he got.
5. He organizes his socks, and everything else.
6. He prepares his own breakfast the night before to save time in the morning because getting up no later than 4:30 might not be enough time.
7. His Dad picked him up from school once in a car that had no body, just a frame and wooden boxes for seats.
8. He does great impressions of Billy Graham, Jimmy Stewart, Ronald Reagan, and Ross Perot.” No kidding!
Now on to John McCain. Actually, McCain at 71 is an entirely different kettle of fish — he’s not particularly liked by the Christian evangelical right but then again he’s been married twice. He met and courted his present wife while still married to his first, after a string of very public affairs.
There is a long section on his website about his support of abortion, but if you key “women’s rights” into the search engine, his wife Cindy’s part of the website comes up complete with Cindy’s Recipes, a range of no doubt delicious recipes ranging from Ahi Tuna with Napa Cabbage Slaw to Homemade Guacamole — all of which are no doubt prepared by her cook.
Cindy comes from one of the US’s richest families. Her daddy founded the world’s third largest brewer and the biggest brewery in the US, the Anheuser-Busch beer and liquor distributor Hensley & Company, which she chairs. She has been open about an addiction to painkillers, which she has conquered. In all, the flawed McCains make the Democrat frontrunners look like saints.
Cindy was the person who propelled McCain, a military pilot, to politics, which makes the avowal on his website “Democracy is not for sale” a tad suspect.
On it McCain notes: “The American people have been alienated from the process of self-government by the overwhelming appearance of their elected leaders having sold-out to the big-moneyed special interests who help finance political campaigns … [what] most Americans worry about profoundly is corporations or individuals with huge checks seeking the undue influence on lawmakers that such largesse is intended to purchase … As President, John McCain will see to it that the institutions of self-government are respected pillars of democracy, not commodities to be bought, bartered, or abused.”
He might want to get a better writer for his website too.
His views on marriage are interesting for a known womaniser: “The family represents the foundation of Western civilisation and civil society and John McCain believes the institution of marriage is a union between one man and one woman. It is only this definition that sufficiently recognises the vital and unique role played by mothers and fathers in the raising of children, and the role of the family in shaping, stabilising, and strengthening communities and our nation.”
The mention of one man and one woman makes it clear that gay marriage will not be a cause he will be likely to embrace.
Alongside his war-hero status — he was a fighter pilot who survived four plane crashes, imprisonment and severe torture — he also has a history of belonging to the Century Club in the military for demerits (unshined shoes, talking out of place, etc …)
But McCain is dangerous to the Democratic cause now cleaved straight down the middle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, because although the small Congressman (1,70m) is feisty, aggressive and will be the oldest president to take office if he wins, he is also more often honourable than not.
He is bright, doesn’t tolerate fools and consults. He comes from a family of admirals so his inclination is to back the military. He is in favour of increasing the war in Iraq and perhaps Iran rather than retreating — despite his experience of the failures of Vietnam.
In 1986 he was one of the Republicans who voted against Reagan’s veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which imposed sanctions against South Africa, and more than any other Act firmly put a host of nails in apartheid’s coffin.
In 2005, he introduced the McCain Detainee Amendment to the Defence Appropriations Bill, which was passed 90-9 in the Senate to prohibit inhumane treatment of prisoners — especially those detained in the course of the so-called war on terror. When asked about the possibility of war against Iran, he sang, “Bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beachboy’s Barbara-Ann.
He is superstitious and carries good luck talismans including a feather, a compass, shoes, pen, penny and a rock.
We, as outsiders, can laugh at these people, but hey, Americans voted them into office — the US voting public is notoriously unpredictable. Barack Obama at present has more voting delegates than any other candidate, Republican or Democrat, but it is 10 months before Americans actually ease out of their armchairs and brave the chill of early winter to vote for the next US president; a lot can happen in that time.
One of the challenges Obama and Clinton face is that they don’t become so caught up in fighting each other that they fail to define the policies they will support when they come into power. McCain can easily trounce Huckabee unless there really is something in the drinking water in the US that we have to do something about. McCain has pretty much a straight run to the Republican nomination now, whereas the Democrats could waste a lot of steam and public sympathy in fighting each other.
In a sense, the contest has just begun. Now is the time to pray.
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