ROLLING STONE MEET REVEREND HUCKABEE

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MATT TAIBBI, ROLLING STONE - Mike Huckabee represents something that is
either tremendously encouraging or deeply disturbing, depending on your
point of view: a marriage of Christian fundamentalism with economic
populism. Rather than employing the patented Bush-Rove tactic of using
abortion and gay rights to hoodwink low-income Christians into
supporting patrician, pro-corporate policies, Huckabee is a
bigger-government Republican who emphasizes prison reform and poverty
relief. In the world of GOP politics, he represents something entirely
new -- a cross between John Edwards and Jerry Falwell, an ordained
Southern Baptist preacher who actually seems to give a shit about the
working poor.

But Huckabee is also something else: full-blown nuts, a Christian
goofball of the highest order. He believes the Earth may be only 6,000
years old, angrily rejects the evidence that human beings evolved from
"primates" and thinks America wouldn't need so much Mexican labor if we
allowed every aborted fetus to grow up and enter the workforce. . .

As governor of Arkansas, he outraged Republicans with his plan to expand
health coverage for children, his embrace of refugees from Katrina and
his support for subsidized higher education for the children of illegal
immigrants. Worse still, from a Republican standpoint, Huckabee showed
little hesitation in raising taxes to pay for such programs -- one
analysis claims that new taxes initiated during his tenure resulted in a
net tax increase of $505 million. Even Max Brantley, editor of the
Arkansas Times and one of Huckabee's most ferocious critics, concedes
that the candidate's populism isn't an act. . .

For all his political waffling in other areas -- Huckabee has
flip-flopped on a host of earthly political issues, from taxes to local
control of school boards -- he leaves absolutely no doubt about his
commitment to religious wackohood. . .

Huckabee gave [a] damning glimpse into his inner batshit self in a
recent appearance at the Prestonwood Baptist Church near Dallas, where
he told audiences that Christians are sitting in the pole position of
the race to Armageddon. "If you're with Jesus Christ, we know how it
turns out in the final moment," he said. "I've read the last chapter in
the book, and we do end up winning."

Winning? I ask Huckabee when, exactly, he thinks victory will arrive.
"When I was eighteen, I thought I had it pretty well figured out," he
says. "I thought the end of the world was coming at any moment." But
when I ask how his views have changed, he says only that he is "less
adamant now." Huckabee, with the wisdom of age, apparently believes we
have at least a day or two left until the end of the world.

The troubling thing about Huckabee's God rhetoric is that a man who is
glad that Christians will "win" at Armageddon must be happy about the
rest of us losing. When I press him on whether he believes all
non-Christians are eternally damned, Huckabee is evasive. "Being
president isn't about picking who goes to heaven and who goes to hell,"
he says. When none other than Bill O'Reilly hammered him on the same
point a day later, Huckabee conceded that "I believe Jesus is the way to
heaven.". . .

This God stuff isn't just talk with Huck. One of his first acts as
governor was to block Medicaid from funding an abortion for a mentally
retarded teenager who had been raped by her stepfather -- an act in
direct violation of federal law, which requires states to pay for
abortions in cases of rape. "The state didn't fund a single such
abortion while Huckabee was governor," says Dr. William Harrison of the
Fayetteville Women's Clinic. "Zero."

As president, Huck would support a constitutional amendment banning
abortion and would give science a back seat to religion. "Science
changes with every generation and with new discoveries, and God
doesn't," he says. "So I'll stick with God if the two are in conflict."
. . .

http://www.alternet.org/story/68057/

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