Until Mitt Romney demanded that Mike Huckabee apologize for daring to criticize President Bush's "arrogant bunker mentality," not much was known about Huckabee's foreign policy -- a frightening prospect, given his frontrunner status in some early primary states, including Iowa, South Carolina, Florida, and Michigan -- and his propensity to hang around with pre-millenial dispensationalists. The most Zev Chavets could wring out of Huckabee for his New York Times Magazine profile was that he likes to read Thomas Friedman and Frank Gaffney and thinks that Duncan Hunter would be just dandy as secretary of defense.
It was odd then, that just a few days after the Times Magazine piece ran, Huckabee's foreign policy treatise appeared in Foreign Affairs. In tone, at least, it was decidedly more Friedman-esque than Gaffney-esque; even so, given Huckabee's past deer-in-the-headlights reactions to foreign policy questions, it seemed to come entirely out of the blue. After all, is it possible that for all these months Huckabee was secretly ruminating on matters such as providing Turkey with intelligence to fight the PKK, how to diplomatically contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, or what a "waste" the Bush Administration Pakistan policy has been? If he has been thinking about all of this, he certainly hasn't let on.
Huckabee threw a few bones to the hard right in the Foreign Affairs piece, with statements such as "America's culture of life stands in stark contrast to the jihadists' culture of death" and "I welcome the Bush administration's new sanctions against Iran and its decision to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guards as a proliferators of weapons of mass destruction and its al Quds force as a supporter of terrorism." But can his new-found "seriousness" on foreign policy expand his support beyond the religious right?
2. Duncan Hunter for PresidentSecretary of Defense
Huckabee revealed a lot about his thinking (or lack thereof) on defense issues when he threw out Hunter's name as a potential secretary of defense. Offering up the name of the conservative Christian hawk and former chair of the House Armed Services Committee undoubtedly was a calculated move: although Hunter barely registers in public opinion polls, he is the favorite presidential candidate of many RINO hunters - the fanatically anti-immigrant, vociferously anti-tax wing of the party that doesn't much care for Huckabee. And Hunter is well-liked among Christian conservatives, too, getting plaudits for showing up for Christians United for Israel (CUFI) events, and for advocating the Christianization of the armed forces.
In an interview with televangelist Jesse Duplantis on the Trinity Broadcasting Network's (TBN) Praise the Lord program this summer, Hunter claimed his son, a Marine, said "the Gospel is strong in the United States Marine Corps. Wherever they're at, out there out on the battlefield, they pray. They pray a lot ... Our soldiers, our sailors, our airmen, our Marines, they're strong in the word of God, and that's why they have the faith to do what they do for us."
Duplantis wondered aloud whether "it's very hard" for Hunter in Congress with "so many people saying you can't say Jesus's name... How do you handle that?"
"You just keep saying Jesus's name, and you keep praying in Jesus's name," Hunter replied, recounting how on the Armed Services Committee he had "chances to do something for Jesus," like when he made sure that regulations preventing sectarian prayer were stripped out of a defense bill, "so that our chaplains could pray ... in Jesus's name."
3. Is Huckabee a Dispensationalist?
You don't catch Huckabee talking about biblical prophecy or the end-times, but many of his key supporters -- particularly his friend and Left Behind author Tim LaHaye -- are some of the country's leading proponents of the imminence of the rapture and of the need for the non-saved to fall on their knees and accept Jesus before it happens -- you know, it might just happen while you're reading The FundamentaList!
LaHaye spoke this fall at Jerry Falwell's church, Thomas Road Baptist Church, and he had quite a few doozeys to offer up about non-Christians. Emphasizing that "we have a responsibility to spread the message," and "we have more signs of our Lord's return than any generation before us," LaHaye went on to berate Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses for not accepting Jesus as the son of God:
One of the most ridiculous things I've heard the skeptics say today is that Jesus never claimed to be God. Folks, that is absolutely untrue. All through the Scriptures, he made assertions that can only be attributed to God. For example, in the fifth chapter of John, which is one of my favorite chapters in the whole bible, it makes it clear that Jesus alienated the religious leaders of his day by healing a man on the Sabbath day. And in verse 18 it says, therefore, the Jews sought all the more to kill him.
He then snickered and referred sarcastically to the Jews as "nice, friendly people."
And in another appearance on TBN in October (the same program on which LaHaye predicted God could bring us a Huckabee presidency), LaHaye ruminated on whether America would stay out of what he believes to be a biblically-prophesied conflict between a Russian-led Arab army and Israel. "If we have a change of administration," he said, "the liberals are very socialistically-minded, and they're more interested in setting up a world government than they are in protecting our own country. And so I can see them giving the opposition everything they want."
But regardless of what America does, LaHaye believes God will ultimately vanquish the Russian-Arab army. What's left of the Islamic world will "be in shock," said LaHaye, adding that "there won't be any atheists in the world" either.
4. Proposed Amendment to Ban Gay Marriage on 2008 Ballot in Florida
After trying for three years, the anti-gay group Florida4Marriage.org finally collected enough signatures to get a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage on the ballot in November 2008. Gay marriage is already banned by statute in Florida, but John Stemberger, an Orlando personal injury lawyer leading the effort, has said the amendment is needed to prevent those dreaded "activist" judges from ruling the statute unconstitutional. (Matthew Staver, chief counsel for the Jerry Falwell-founded Liberty Counsel and a Huckabee supporter, drafted the proposed amendment.)
When it was floundering last year, the Florida4Marriage effort spoke earlier this month. Early on in this video LaHaye is shown introducing his friend Huckabee to the Iowa Pastors' Briefing.
At a Florida event, Laurence White, who also helped organize the one in Iowa, likened pastors' imperative to oppose gay marriage to standing up to Nazism.
5. Huck-A-Muck Round-Up from Around the Internets
- David Corn reviews Huckabee's 1998 book, Kids That Kill, and finds diatribes like "the legal commitment of ideological secularism to any and all of the fanatically twisted fringes of American culture -- pornographers, gay activists, abortionists, and other professional liberationists -- is a pathetically self-defeating crusade that has confused liberty with license." (This was written around the time Huckabee's 17 year-old son was accused of torturing a dog.)
- Robert Parry details the scandalous past of Huckabee's new campaign chair, former Reagan campaign strategist Ed Rollins, who has refused to divulge the "identity of a top Filipino politician who admitted delivering an illegal $10 million cash payment to Ronald Reagan's 1984 campaign from Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos."
- John Perr compiles a top-ten (actually a bit more than ten) list of Huckabee's wingnuttery.
- Still more revelations about Huckabee's propensity, under political pressure, to grant clemency to criminals, from Joe Conason and the National Review; about his fondness for giving campaign donors political appointments, and how he took money from tobacco companies to mobilize pastors to oppose the 1993 Clinton health care plan.
Now that sounds like something Jesus would do.
Contact me at tapthefundamentalist AT gmail DOT com.
