Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, did a passable job on Meet the Press of backing away of his pledge to lead the country back for Jesus Christ.
MR. RUSSERT: But when you say “take this nation back for Christ,” what does that say to Jews, Muslims, agnostics, atheists? What...He also tried to sound reasonable on abortion and gays, too, like he wasn't too sure about the South Dakota draconian "We own your uterus" bill, or that when we said "We've gone from 'Leave it to Beaver' to 'Bevis and Butt-head, from Barney Fife to Barney Frank," he wasn't really singling out the only openly gay member of Congress as some kind of symbol of America's moral decline. Oh no sirree, Mr. Russert. Uh huh.
GOV. HUCKABEE: Well, I think I—I’d probably phrase it a little differently today. But I don’t want to make people think that I’m going to replace the Capitol dome with a steeple or change the legislative sessions for prayer meetings. What it does mean is that people of faith do need to exercise their sense of responsibility toward education, toward health, toward the environment. All of those issues, for me, are driven by my sense that this is a wonderful world that God’s made, we’re responsible for taking care of it. We’re responsible for being responsible managers and stewards of it. I think that’s what faith ought to do in our lives if we’re in public service.
It's fun to watch the righties scramble to try to find a safe place to run for president from, and it's even more fun to watch the hard-core righties, who proudly proclaim that they'll never compromise their principles just to win an election, are "open" to looking at candidates such as Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani. (The only thing they agree on is that they all hate John McCain.) Mitt Romney is doing everything he can to prove that he really has had a change of heart about being pro-choice and pro-gay since he ran for the Senate, and the former mayor of New York, who is pro-choice, pro-gay rights, doesn't apologize for it. How's that going to sit with the Talibangelistas like Dobson and Falwell who demand absolute fealty to the Religious Reich?
And what's even more fun that is how they're all trying desperately to sound like they're real conservatives -- not like the current president -- without sounding like they're totally disowning him and his war, his incompetence, and the now-ingrained impression that conservatives are vengeful, secretive, gay-bashing busybodies who blame everybody else for their own problems, wouldn't know irony if it bit them on the ass, and have raised the art of smug hypocrisy to the realm of gob-smacking genius.
This is going to be fun.
