Huck Gets It
As I see it, and as I’ve said, there’s not a candidate with a perfect record, not one who’s done everything the way I’d do it (and of course, America would be fixed pronto if a candidate would simply do everything my way…ahem.). At any rate, Mike Huckabee has about 3-4 questions that I think he’ll need to answer satisfactorily to the American public (first, to the Republican primary voters) before he can be elected president. Incidentally, I think that the issues he needs to answer likely pale in comparison to those of virtually all of the other choices for president. As I see it, the substantive issues he needs to address are immigration, taxes, and defense/the war on terrorism. Beyond this, I think that there are two little nagging things that he can probably deal with pretty easily: his support for the parole of a man who went on to commit murder after his release (defense: “I’m not God, and don’t know the future; I made a mistake I deeply regret on this one”—which is just about exactly what he’s said), and the fact that he was brought up on some ethics charges while he was governor of Arkansas (defense: “as the first Republican governor elected in that state since Methuselah was in Huggies, I had a target on my back from day one, and the charges were contrived and trumped up”—which is exactly what he’s saying, and which I happen to believe). But I digress…
The point of this post is to say that, when it comes to immigration, it’s clear from Huck’s recently-released 9-point plan that he gets it. Item One, if you’ll notice, is exactly, perfectly, dead-on correct: build a fence. Stop the problem of illegal immigration, and then figure out what to do with the folks who are here (and a lot of the rest of his plan deals with that). McCain doesn’t get it, having supported the president’s plan (and the president, of course, doesn’t get it either). If we will get the fence built first; if we’ll stop the flow of illegals, then we can have a nice, civil discussion about what to do with the gazillion folks already here illegally. Despite the outcry from a lot of the conservative pundits and talk-show hosts, I’m pretty open to any number of possibilities as to what to do about that. But it all hinges on this: build a fence first.
And on that point, it’s clear, Huck gets it.
This phrase comes from the 1978 "Jonestown massacre" in which most members of the Peoples Temple cult, blindly following their leader Jim Jones, committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
Osborne: A Contrarian's Guide to Knowing God
Schlossberg: Idols For Destruction
