Republican candidates

[Paddy]

If you think any of these clowns are presidential material, please explain why


Oct 21, 11:59 PM (ET)

By LIBBY QUAID

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) - Republican front-runners Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney defended their conservative credentials in the face of pointed attacks from campaign rivals Sunday night in the most aggressive debate to date of the race for the White House.

"You've just spent the last year trying to fool people about your record. I don't want you to start fooling them about mine," Arizona Sen. John McCain bluntly told Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts.

Former Sen. Fred Thompson made Giuliani his target, saying the former New York mayor supported federal funding for abortion, gun control and havens for illegal immigrants.

"He sides with Hillary Clinton on each of those issues," added Thompson, referring to the New York Democrat who leads in the polls for her party's presidential nomination.

(AP) Republican presidential hopeful former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, left, laughs along with former...
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The clashes in the early moments of a 90-minute debate prompted former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to say he wanted no part of a "demolition derby" with others of his own party. "What I'm interested in is fighting for the American people."

Whatever their disagreements among one another, the eight rivals agreed on one issue. They took turns criticizing Clinton, the Democratic front-runner.

Asked whether she was fit to be commander in chief, Romney replied, "I'd vote no."

Giuliani said he agreed with one thing the former first lady said recently. "I have a million ideas. America cannot afford them all," he quoted her as saying as laughter filled the debate hall. "I'm not making it up."

McCain said Clinton had recently tried to spend $1 million on a Woodstock Museum, commemorating perhaps the most famous counterculture event of the 1960s.

(AP) Republican presidential hopeful former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, right, makes a speaks as...
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"Now my friends I wasn't there. I'm sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event," he said.

"I was tied up at the time," he deadpanned, and the audience rose to applaud the reference to the five and a half years McCain spent as a prisoner of war during Vietnam.

The debate was the first since Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas dropped out of the race, winnowing the field. The remaining rivals stood on a stage at a resort 10 miles from Walt Disney World, fielding questions at an event broadcast by Fox News Channel.

The leadoff Iowa caucuses are scheduled for Jan. 3, 2008, for Republicans. In their most recent debate, Oct. 9, Giuliani and Romney swapped charges with each other, vying for primacy in the race.

This time they largely ignored each other. Instead, Giuliani's lead in the nation polls, as well as Romney's perceived strength in early voting states, made them obvious targets for McCain and Thompson.

(AP) Republican presidential hopeful former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, right, gets last minute...
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The first question went to Giuliani, asked whether he was more conservative than Thompson. "I can't comment on Fred," the former mayor said.

He then added that he had brought down crime, cleaned up Times Square, cut taxes and eliminated the city's deficits. "I think that was a pretty darned good conservative record," he said.

Giuliani took a more conservative position on gay marriage than he has thus far, saying he would support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage if states begin to legalize it.

Giuliani lived with an openly gay couple after separating from his second wife, Donna Hanover, and one member of the couple said at the time that Giuliani promised to marry them if gay marriage was ever legalized.

Attacked by the former Tennessee senator moments later, Giuliani fired back at his antagonist. "Fred has problems, too," he said. He said Thompson was the "single biggest obstacle" in the Senate to legislation limiting the ability of individuals filing lawsuits to recover unlimited damages.

(AP) Republican presidential hopefuls Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, left, answers a questionas former Arkansas...
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"He stood with the Democrats over and over again" on the issue, Giuliani added.

Thompson said he believed states should decide whether to limit lawsuits in their own states.

Republicans in Congress tried for years to pass legislation that would cap damages in lawsuits, but never succeeded before losing their majority to Democrats in 2006.

Romney was asked about McCain's earlier claims that he had shifted positions on a number of issues to appeal to conservative Republicans.

The former Massachusetts governor responded that he was proud of his record, particularly since the state had an overwhelmingly Democratic Legislature. "I fought to make sure we kept our taxes down. I fought for pro-growth strategies. I cut taxes," he said.

Moments later, though, McCain personally turned on Romney.

"Governor Romney, you've been spending the last year trying to fool people about your record. I don't want you to start fooling them about mine," he said.

Saying he would run on his record as a conservative, McCain added, "I don't think you can fool the American people. I think the first thing you'd need is their respect."

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20071022/D8SE214O0.html

[Manedwolf]

I thought Huckabee made them look like fools. He came off as intelligent and aware, not posing.

[stevelyn]

Ron Paul is the only one with the integrity to be POTUS.

[Balog]

Huckabee has been impressing me. I heard a clip of him being interviewed by IIRC Glenn Beck on the 2nd and he sounded like one of us.

Thompson is shaping up as a colossal disappointment.

[Thor]

Ron Paul is the only one with the integrity to be POTUS.

Oh, please.........

Too bad that Ron Paul doesn't have the integrity to declare his candidacy under the Libertarian Party, which he truly is. No, instead, he hides under the cloak of the GOP.

Actually, I like Hunter & Huckabee right now. Too bad that neither one of them stand the chance of getting the nod from the GOP. I agree with Balog, Thompson is a sinking ship.

[CAnnoneer]

Huckabee is pro-illegal. Ron is a Libertarian who seems to think conservative values are essentially Libertarian (how did he get so confused?) Giuliani is Hillary with boobs.

Hunter is the guy, but he won't win the nomination. My bet is on Romney.

[LAK]

Thor

Oh, please.........

Too bad that Ron Paul doesn't have the integrity to declare his candidacy under the Libertarian Party, which he truly is. No, instead, he hides under the cloak of the GOP.

Ron Paul has a platform supporting no borders with Canada and Mexico

Oh please indeed.

---------------------------------

http://searchronpaul.com
http://ussliberty.org
http://ssunitedstates.org

[stevelyn]

Ron Paul is the only one with the integrity to be POTUS.

Oh, please.........

Too bad that Ron Paul doesn't have the integrity to declare his candidacy under the Libertarian Party, which he truly is. No, instead, he hides under the cloak of the GOP.

Actually, I like Hunter & Huckabee right now. Too bad that neither one of them stand the chance of getting the nod from the GOP. I agree with Balog, Thompson is a sinking ship.

At least his congressional votes reconcile with what he says, which are many times better than the rest of the mooks.

Ron is a Libertarian who seems to think conservative values are essentially libertarian (how did he get so confused?)

Why is it that most professed republicans seem to think fascist values are essentially conservative (how did they get so confused?).

My bet is on Romney

.

Anyone who has managed to get elected to public office anywhere in the Peoples' Repugnant of New England states (or Commiefornia) can't be good for the rest of the country.

[Manedwolf]

Huckabee is pro-illegal. Ron is a Libertarian who seems to think conservative values are essentially Libertarian (how did he get so confused?) Giuliani is Hillary with boobs.

Hunter is the guy, but he won't win the nomination. My bet is on Romney.

Romney, who presided over the 1998 MA AWB and the most draconian gun laws outside Chicago, Romney, who presided over the Big Dig taxpayer boondoogle...

I was the guy's neighbor in the next state. NO THANK YOU.

[longrifleman]

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=12205

Came across this today. Anybody from Ark. able to verify this, or is it a hit piece?


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A Tale of Two Candidates
By Quin Hillyer 
Published 10/24/2007 12:08:28 AM

 
 With Sen. Sam Brownback now out of the presidential race, only two candidates in the Republican presidential field -- California's longtime U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee -- can lay claim both to a high degree of purity on the hot-button issues for social conservatives and to a personal life that seems in keeping with those traditional values.

But only one, Huckabee, seems to be gaining major traction... even though the record in Arkansas suggests that he might be the wrong one to rally around.

Ask lots of folks in Arkansas, including Republicans, and a fair number will probably tell you that Huck is for Huck is for Huck. National media folks like David Brooks, dealing in surface appearances only, rave about what a nice guy Huckabee is, and a moral exemplar to boot. If they only did a little homework, they would discover a guy with a thin skin, a nasty vindictive streak, and a long history of imbroglios about questionable ethics.

Once, Gov. Huckabee even had the gall to file suit against the state ethics commission. He lost.

Fourteen times, the ethics commission -- a respected body, not a partisan witch-hunt group -- investigated claims against Huckabee. Five of those times, it officially reprimanded him. And, as only MSNBC among the big national media has reported at any real length, there were lots of other mini-scandals and embarrassments along the way.

He used public money for family restaurant meals, boat expenses, and other personal uses. He tried to claim as his own some $70,000 of furniture donated to the governor's mansion. He repeatedly, and obstinately, against the pleadings even from conservative columnists and editorials, refused to divulge the names of donors to a "charitable" organization he set up while lieutenant governor -- an outfit whose main charitable purpose seemed to be to pay Huckabee to make speeches. Then, as a kicker, he misreported the income itself from the suspicious "charity."

Huckabee has been criticized, reasonably so, for misusing the state airplane for personal reasons. And he and his wife, Janet, actually set up a "wedding gift registry" (they had already been married for years) to which people could donate as the Huckabees left the governorship, in order to furnish their new $525,000 home.

According to the Arkansas News Bureau (Feb. 1, 2003), "Huckabee's personal lawyer, Kevin Crass of Little Rock, has said Huckabee believes there should be no limit on gifts short of a bribe." After all, said Janet Huckabee, public officials like her husband should be automatically trusted: "Until you absolutely positively know that the man has outright lied to you, it should be enough that the man's word is that everything was done appropriately, legally, to the best of his knowledge to the letter of the law."

Of course, her reasoning refutes itself: If one is precluded from even questioning "the man's word," how can one possibly find out in the first place whether the official "has outright lied to you"?

It must be said that a fair-minded journalist ought to tread lightly in scrutinizing a candidate's spouse; but in Janet Huckabee's case, she is a politician in her own right, having run unsuccessfully for Arkansas Secretary of State. Voters overwhelmingly rejected her, perhaps because they remembered her propensity for other outrageous statements -- such as the time when she defended secrecy about the donors to her husband's "charity" by saying that a donor's name "wouldn't be enough. [Then] you'd want to know who he was married to, and then his wife would be German descent, and you'd have Mike, you'd have him responsible for 600,000 killings of Jews."

Huh?

Of course, nobody accused Huckabee of genocide. But his skin is so thin that when various underlings in his administration, even for bureaus as small as the state film office, crossed ethical lines (some of them, admittedly, rather minor), the governor consistently and angrily attacked the media for reporting the transgressions rather than demanding that the transgressors make things right.

Finally, Gov. Huckabee had a propensity to be almost as prodigal with pardons as was his famous predecessor by the name of Clinton. Indeed, Hillary Clinton's campaign team is probably licking their chops at the prospect of Huck as the nominee, because one of his pardons, in particular, was so outlandish as to make Willie Horton's case in Massachusetts seem almost child's play by comparison. After Huckabee helped secure the release of already-well-known rapist Wayne Dumond, the released convict sexually assaulted and murdered a woman in Missouri.

All of which leads one to ask two questions: First, how can voters whose primary concerns are moral look beyond so many of a candidate's problems with ethics? And, second, if Republicans in general have concluded, as most of them have, that repeated scandals among Washington GOPers played a huge role in Republican defeats in 2006, how could they possibly nominate somebody who seems to have such big ethical blind spots?

Give this to Huckabee: The man gives a good speech. But so does Duncan Hunter, with the biggest difference being that Hunter's speeches appeal more to the intellect than the heartstrings -- and that Hunter can boast 25 years of leadership for conservative causes, including on taxing and spending issues where Huckabee is notoriously un-conservative.

For that matter, if the question is public ethics, all the other major Republican candidates have rather solid records. With so little scandalous material to look into, why hasn't the usually scandal-ravenous national media delved into the record of the one GOP candidate whose ethics have been repeatedly questioned in his home state?

Has even the cynical big media been fooled by a Huckster?


Quin Hillyer is a senior editor of The American Spectator. He can be reached at qhillyer@gmail.com.   
 
 
 
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[Patriot]

Why is it that most professed republicans seem to think fascist values are essentially conservative (how did they get so confused?).

fascism  A right-wing nationalist ideology or movement with a totalitarian and hierarchical structure that is fundamentally opposed to democracy and liberalism. In ancient Rome, the authority of the state was symbolized by the fasces, a bundle of rods bound together (signifying popular unity) with a protruding axe-head (denoting leadership). As such, it was appropriated by Mussolini to label the movement he led to power in Italy in 1922, but was subsequently generalized to cover a whole range of movements in Europe during the inter-war period. These include the National Socialists in Germany, as well as others such as Action Fran?aise, the Arrow Cross in Hungary, or the Falangists in Spain. In the post-war period, the term has been used, often prefixed by neo, to describe what are viewed as successors to these movements, as well as Peronism and, most recently, some movements in ex-Communist countries, such as Pamyat in Russia (see extreme-right parties). Given such diversity, does the term have any meaning?

Genuinely fascist ideologies are: monist, that is to say, based upon the notion that there are fundamental and basic truths about humanity and the environment which do not admit to question; simplistic, in the sense of ascribing complex phenomena to single causes and advancing single remedies; fundamentalist, that is, involving a division of the world into good and bad with nothing in between; and conspiratorial, that is, predicated on the existence of a secret world-wide conspiracy by a hostile group seeking to manipulate the masses to achieve and/or maintain a dominant position.

In content, these ideologies are distinguished by five main components. (1) Extreme nationalism, the belief that there is a clearly defined nation which has its own distinctive characteristics, culture, and interests, and which is superior to others. (2) An assertion of national declinethat at some point in the mythical past the nation was great, with harmonious social and political relationships, and dominant over others, and that subsequently it has disintegrated, become internally fractious and divided, and subordinate to lesser nations. (3) This process of national decline is often linked to a diminution of the racial purity of the nation. In some movements the nation is regarded as co-extensive with the race (the nation race), while in others, hierarchies of races are defined generically with nations located within them (the race nation); in virtually all cases, the view is taken that the introduction of impurities has weakened the nation and been responsible for its plight. (4) The blame for national decline and/or racial miscegenation is laid at the door of a conspiracy on the part of other nations/races seen as competing in a desperate struggle for dominance. (5) In that struggle, both capitalism and its political form, liberal democracy, are seen as mere divisive devices designed to fragment the nation and subordinate it further in the world order.

With regard to prescriptive content, the first priority is the reconstitution of the nation as an entity by restoring its purity. The second is to restore national dominance by reorganizing the polity, the economy, and society. Means to this end include variously: (1) the institution of an authoritarian and antiliberal state dominated by a single party; (2) total control by the latter over political aggregation, communication, and socialization; (3) direction by the state of labour and consumption to create a productionist and self-sufficient economy; and (4) a charismatic leader embodying the real interests of the nation and energizing the masses. With these priorities fulfilled, the nation would then be in a position to recapture its dominance, if necessary by military means.

Such priorities were explicit in the inter-war fascist movements, which indulged in racial/ethnic cleansing, established totalitarian political systems, productionist economies, and dictatorships, and of course went to war in pursuit of international dominance. But such parties can no longer openly espouse these extremes, and national/racial purity now takes the form of opposition to continuing immigration and demands for repatriation; totalitarianism and dictatorship have been replaced by lesser demands for a significant strengthening in the authority of the state, allegedly within a democratic framework; productionism has become interventionism; and military glory has been largely eschewed.

Fascism was less defined by its policies, however, which were often ad hoc, than by its ideology, organization, and style. Ideologically, it celebrated youth, vigor, order, discipline, violence, and hierarchy. Organizationally, it was based on a revolutionary mass movement led by a charismatic absolute leader. Stylistically, it cultivated a combination of archaic, mystical, and militaristic symbolism.

Social scientists most often interpret fascism as a response of the lower middle classes to economic crisis, defeat in World War I, and the threat of communist revolution, although it also received support from the bourgeoisie and some sectors of the working class.

Simplistic, fundamentalist, conspiratorial.  I wonder whose supporters best embody these characteristics      See how fun it is to hand pick a few salient points and conveniently ignore the rest?   

While there are a few thematic and topical similarities, characterizing the average Republican's values as fascist is absurd and hyperbolic. 

[roo_ster]

Not to mention discrediting of the characterizer.

[SteveS]

The signers of the Declaration of Independence were "brave people, most of whom, by the way, were clergymen."

Mike Huckabee on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 in Orlando

Not even close, Mike.  Only one of the 56 was an active clergyman, and that was John Witherspoon.  Even if you include former clergy, that number only goes up to possibly 4.  I know this is only a minor point, but it still bugs me.

[Manedwolf]

[Balog]

[/shrugs] If you think anyone who rises to being a legit candidate for POTUS is anything other than a vile discredit to the human race, you don't understand how politics work. But even evil people aren't wholly so; and whatever the motives one must pick the candidate who seems least harmful.

Had heard about Huck's being weak on illegals, but didn't know if it was true. And compared to the rest of the candidates......