Friday, September 7, 2007

Huckabee Hound: The Face of the GOP "Honor-Killing" Cult

Christian statesman Ron Paul confronts Mike Huckabee, the War Party's Elmer Gantry.


"The word `honor' in the mouth of Daniel Webster is like the word `love' in the mouth of a whore."
-- John Randolph


Despite the commendable achievement of losing roughly one hundred pounds of bodyfat, Mike Huckabee retains enough butter in his veins to ooze out oleaginous platitudes at will. Perhaps this trait, which he shares with another former Governor of Arkansas, is a prerequisite for holding that, ahem, august office. It certainly endears him to the sort of people who perceive high-viscosity insincerity as a form of charisma.

Huckabee Hound displayed this dubious skill to memorable effect the other night when he unwisely confronted Ron Paul about the Texas statesman's principled opposition to the war in Iraq.

However svelte he's become, Huckabee -- in an intellectual sense -- resembles a can of Spam, which is mostly fat. The whippet-thin Ron Paul, by way of contrast, is sharper than a Ginsu knife. The result of Huckabee's imprudent decision to take on Dr. Paul was as predictable as a clash between a ring bologna and a freshly sharpened slicer.



















Want Herr Huckabee to address your Bund meeting, but he's over-booked? This potted "meat" product will make a suitable substitute.


The Huckster got off to a bad start by committing an act of rhetorical larceny -- trying to steal some of the prestige John McCain enjoys because of his war wounds (which he received, I hasten to point out, in the course of an earlier illegal, immoral, undeclared and useless war).

Figuratively wrapping himself in the robes of McCain the Martyr, Huckabee insisted that we can't leave Iraq "until we've left with honor.... [W]hether or not we should have gone to Iraq is a discussion that historians can have, but we're there. We bought it because we broke it. We've got a responsibility to the honor of this country and to the honor of every man and woman who has served in Iraq and ever served in our military to not leave them with anything less than the honor that they deserve."

Rep. Paul -- who, unlike Huckabee, has served honorably in the military -- correctly pointed out that the "honor" of our nation would not be injured by withdrawal, since American people never committed themselves to the war in the only constitutionally legitimate fashion: A formal congressional declaration of war. With scalpel-like incisiveness, Dr. Paul likewise laid bare the fundamental obscenity at the heart of Huckabee's bromide-laden pronouncement:

"How many more [lives] do you want to lose? How long are we going to be there? How long -- what do we have to pay to save face? That's all we're doing is saving face. It's time we came home!"

Like Bill Clinton, the original "Man from Hope" -- who was actually born in Hot Springs, which Mafia defector Joe Valachi identified as a key spot in the Mob's southern network-- Huckabee is adept at disguising a huge, malodorous lie inside a bouquet of pleasant-smelling platitudes. (Once again I find myself wondering if such a facility is a mandatory prerequisite for those seeking to occupy the large, tacky building at 1800 Center Street in Little Rock.) The lie in this instance was that Huckabee is zealous to uphold our nation's "honor," when he is clearly and obviously concerned about the prestige of the ruling elite.

When one has been caught committing a crime, honor requires that he desist and pay the appropriate penalty.

The invasion of Iraq was essentially an act of armed robbery carried out by a rogue regime.

That crime is compounded by mass murder -- the death through state-sanctioned violence of American troops, Iraqi soldiers, Iraqi civilian non-combatants, and those legitimate resistance fighters who have taken up arms against the foreign invaders illegally occupying their country.

Honor requires, at the very least, an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. It may also require that Washington pay reparations to the people of that nation, although this would pose some serious constitutional problems. Rehabilitating our national honor definitely requires the prosecution of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their neo-Trotskyite retinue, for crimes against our Constitution and what that document refers to (see Article I, sec. 8, clause 10) as the "law of nations."

But Herr Huckabee, like nearly everyone in the political caste, is a stranger in the house of honor. Rather than confronting the unyielding moral realities of the Iraq war, Huckabee takes refuge in the notion that the acquiescence of a deceived public in an illegal war constitutes a morally binding act of consent, while insisting that neither the public nor its elected representatives can withdraw their consent once the deception becomes unambiguous.

We are "one nation," presumably under one quasi-divine Decider, maintains Huckabee. The subtext here is that the Grand and Glorious Decider (peace be upon him) had his "accountability moment" in 2004, and thus can be said to embody the common will. And he has decided to let the killing continue in Iraq for the cynical, self-serving purpose of avoiding an injury to his personal prestige: He wants his successor to deal with the mess Iraq has become, and preside over the withdrawal that inevitably must come. And Bush is supported by like-minded people from across the narrow partisan divide who wish to preserve the grotesquely bloated powers of the imperial presidency.

This is "honor" in the lexicon of the fascist cult that runs the Republican Party.

Apologists for the envisioned "Long War" against the Islamic world occasionally invoke the genuinely repellent spectacle of "honor killings" sometimes carried out by Muslim males against female relatives accused of disgracing the family name.

















Above, below: Iraqi civilians confront the threat from the Bush-bot "honor-killing" cult.


The Bush regime and its supporters, however, are engaged in an immeasurably larger and bloodier version of the same depraved exercise. They claim the right -- nay, the duty -- to kill thousands, or tens of thousands, of Americans and Iraqis simply to "save face."


Preserving the Regime's prestige an objective not worth so much as a papercut's worth of human blood, let alone the life of a single human being. One would expect that an individual like Mike Huckabee who professes to be "pro-life" would understand and act on that professed conviction by ending a useless war in order to save innocent lives.

If he did, however, he wouldn't be Mike Huckabee. He'd be Ron Paul.


Please visit The Right Source for frequent updates on the unfolding "Economic Armageddon," and the Liberty Minute archive for audio commentaries about the Larry Craig scandal, the recent anniversary of the massacre at Ruby Ridge, and other important topics.

22 comments:

Anonymous said...

That Herr Huckabee is an ordained minister makes me even more nauseated than usual, he SHOULD know better, but then wrapping oneself in Christianity is a favorite tactic of murderer's and their drones. Thankfully saying one is Christian and BEING one is evidenced by the strict obedience to Christ's commands. Huckabee falls short, Paul shines. May God Bless him. From an imperfect Christian,
Wayne

Anonymous said...

Amen.

dixiedog said...

Just a correction on your linkage: The Right Source ;).

I agree with "anonymous" above in essence about "walking the talk" as opposed to merely "talking the talk." Talk is cheap, after all. (Hint: Peruse their respective voting records ["their walk"] during their tenure on Capitol Hill. Enough said.)

Ron Paul and your attendant commentary make it so monkey-simple to see the Bushevik spokesdrones' attempts to masquerade and/or distort their myriad dichotomies in play here with the concept of honor.

Taylor Conant said...

Will,

I don't think I understand how one can serve "with honor" in an occupation, such as a member of the military, which is paid with stolen money and which, if one is cognizant of even a rough outline of the historical uses of the US military, would lead one to believe that they will not be ordered to do anything "honorable" like defend innocent people from foreign invasion but instead will almost certainly, at some point or another, be called upon to participate in a foreign invasion of other innocent peoples' land, resulting in death, destruction and the general mayhem that is known as "war."

Honor and national military service seem like two mutually exclusive things.

William N. Grigg said...

Taylor, my view is that it is common for honorable people -- particularly those whose understanding of freedom issues is relatively immature -- to gravitate toward what they believe to be "protective" occupations. This includes unambiguously commendable organizations -- such as volunteer fire departments -- and more dubious outfits, such as the police and military.

Ron Paul joined the Air Force as a young man and spent his term of service as a doctor. He was paid through taxpayer funds, which is a constitutional expenditure. ("Constitutional" and "moral" are not necessarily synonymous, of course, and that's an issue for elucidation at another time.) Like decent people currently serving in the Iraq-era military, Paul was in uniform at a time when the military was being used in an immoral foreign war. But there's no evidence that he was any more directly involved in crimes against Vietnamese people than the voters whose elected "representatives" appropriated money to fund that war.

I'll probably have more to say about this soon, but my wife's sister just arrived and the demands of hospitality are making themselves known....

Taylor Conant said...

Will,

Thanks for the insights. Like yourself with the immigration issue, this is a topic I've recently been wrestling with myself... "shades of grey" in concerns with who is and isn't criminally liable/honourable, etc. The wrestlin' and wrasslin' in my own mind has so far produced a 3 hour long AIM debate with Josh Holmes of No-Treason.com, several multi-page e-mail conversations with Charley Hardman of Saltypig.com as well as numerous short conversations with related "real life" friends outside of the internet.

I came at my first comment on this post from a Devil's advocate perspective, albeit one who is already leaning toward an answer.

I read your comments thoughtfully and appreciated your perspective. If I can, I'd like to offer a few more thoughts on the topic... love to get your response if you can pull yourself away from your hosting obligations at some point in the future:

1. While the all-pervasive nature of the State has virtually guaranteed that anyone who does not retreat to a self-dependent lifestyle on a mountain ranch will, at some point, deal with a company or individual who has some connection to stolen wealth handed out by the State, or will deal with a company or individual who has submitted to an unjust State law or regulation, it seems clear to me that at the very least, people who receive 100% of their income from the State are obvious recipients of stolen wealth and therefore are criminals. To try to sidestep this fact with elegant words and thoughts seems to "slippery-slope" logical thought into an area where almost any kind of atrocity could be pardoned for whatever reason.

2. Some (such as Josh Holmes of NT) argue that a person CAN be a police officer, soldier, teacher, etc. (publicly funded positions) so long as they do not act unjustly according to natural law... in other words, a person could be a police officer so long as they only apprehend criminals and protect the innocent and do not enforce speed limits, or drunken driving laws, or drug laws, etc. etc. I reject this argument outright because the nature of the way the "public servant" derives their paycheck (taxes, aka stolen wealth) seems to instantly violate the principle that these people can not go against natural law, and therefore any acts they take afterward with their stolen paychecks in their wallets are not worth considering... just like we wouldn't excuse a Robin Hood from his crimes of theft just because he donated his stealings to a children's hospital.

3. Further elucidating on point 2, however, is this: when one takes the position of a police officer or military person, there is no way to not commit further crimes (beyond the crime of receiving stolen wealth for your services). A soldier is not free to participate in only the "just wars" or only defend the "homeland." Dereliction of duty is punishable with dishonourable disgrace and sometimes death... and because almost EVERY soldier will be asked to do something that violates natural law at some point in his career, it seems pointless to become a soldier in the first place. Same with a police officer... a police officer can't just enforce the naturally righteous laws, he must enforce the unjust ones as well, or lose his job. So what's the point?

4. As far as RP in particular is concerned, he may have joined the USAF as a young man and maintained the non-violent role of a doctor (aside from his violent act of receiving stolen wealth). However, just before he joined, there had already been two, or three, depending on your time-perspective, "recent" major wars of monstrously unjust proportions... WWII and Korea (and WWI if you consider that contemporary to the Vietnam era at all). Certainly he could've looked at those wars and seen "If I join the military, I will most likely be participating in something awful and unjust." It doesn't seem to matter that he chose to serve as a doctor... he was still an enabler of the chaos. It's hard to imagine the military trying to fight a war without doctors to repair wounds... if doctors abstain from serving out of moral dictate... war may potentially be unfightable and thus not occur.

We could get into Josh Holmes theory of "someone was going to serve anyway" but that seems to be a disgusting collectivist argument that denies individual choice, action and responsibility.

5. Again, to reiterate, the biggest problem I have with RP and other "public servants" is that they are enablers of the tyranny above us... whether they serve with good intent or not (it's nice RP tries to keep things Constitutional, but he doesn't have a perfect record, does receive a tax-funded salary despite denying himself the Congressional pension, and his position on the Constitution leads him to also support some things that are decidedly unjust according to natural law, such as regulation of commerce and border enforcement) it is their participation in the system that makes it all possible. If people refused to be a part of the tyranny, who could the State tyrannize and how could they tyrannize them?


Those are just some of the questions that have been going through my head, Will. Again, appreciate any further thoughts you might have.

zach said...

Taylor, there was a Frenchman named Bonet, I believe, who asked many of these questions in the 16th century and had many interesting answers. You seem like an anarchist and I sympathize with that position. You, even in a forum like this, are in the minority however. Most min-archists and libertarians believe in some mechanism of "legal force". That is, we need rule of law, not men. But, in this world, we are limited by the fact we must use men (police) to enforce rule of law. That is, laws protecting persons and property. Murray Rothbard also touches on some of the questions you ask about. The founders of America tried to do this, while realizing, in the words of Frankin, that eventually even this Republic would "devolve into despotism." So , whatever shortcomings Paul may have, he beats the hell out of the other villains, and that's all we have to work with at this point.

Anonymous said...

You all seem to think that RP had a choice as to whether to join up, and he may have had, but possibly not My dad "joined up" in 1954, in the middle of a surgery residency program, because he was told by the military he could sign on as an officer and work as a doctor or he would be drafted as a private. At that point there was not really a choice for him.

Anonymous said...

As someone who has worked long and hard for a number of years on the original kind of "honor" killings, I really wouldn't want to see the phrase used in this new way.

Ellen R. Sheeley, Author
"Reclaiming Honor in Jordan"
(Available on the American version of Amazon.com)

William N. Grigg said...

Dear ERS -

I honor and appreciate your work in trying to expose and, hopefully, end the atrocity of "honor-killing," as that term is commonly understood.

It was not my intention to minimize the horrors that practice entails by applying it to the even larger abomination of continuing an unjust and counter-productive war in the service of something dishonestly called "honor."

Rather than contending over the best way to use a phrase that can properly be applied to both kinds of needless killing, it would be best to work to end the underlying atrocities.

Granted, I have little influence over the policy of the government that rules me, but I have NONE where ending "honor killings" in Jordan is concerned. And although my influence with Washington is infinitesimal, my responsibility as a citizen is to do whatever I can in the hope of getting the regime to change course and stop killing innocent people.

Using the expression "honor killing" to describe the Bush Regime's current policy, and showing how that policy springs from a mindset at least as perverse as that inspiring Muslim "honor killings," might have an impact on people who are at least willing to think in principled terms.

DeadAustrianFan said...

As far as the organized crime link to Hot Springs, Arkansas, that comment was definitely spot on, as usual.

Anyone who has ever spent time or passed through that area knows that Arkansas is the Sicily of the South.

Anonymous said...

picked this up off of a CNN affiliate, curious as to what your take is on it.

McDonald's Worker Charged For Oversalting Burger

POSTED: 6:01 pm EDT September 9, 2007
UPDATED: 8:09 am EDT September 10, 2007


UNION CITY, Ga. -- A 20-year-old McDonald's employee spent a night in jail and is facing criminal charges after a police officer complained that the burger she prepared with too much salt made him sick.

Kendra Bull was charged with misdemeanor reckless conduct and arrested at 1:30 a.m. on Friday. After a court hearing later that morning, she was released on $1,000 bond.

Bull said she accidentally spilled too much salt on the hamburger meat, but she told her supervisor and another co-worker, who she said tried to thump the salt off. Bull took a break and said she ate a burger made from the salty meat.

Union City Police Officer Wendell Adams ordered a Big N' Tasty at the drive-through window and also got a burger made from the oversalted meat. A short time later, Adams returned to the restaurant and told the manager he had gotten sick from eating it.


Bull admitted to spilling the salt on the burger, and the officer asked her to step outside, where he questioned Bull further, she said.

Bull, who said she has worked at the restaurant for five months, said she did not know a police officer had ordered the burger because she could not see the drive-through window from her work area.

Bull said Adams insisted the burger must have had something worse than salt on it. But Adams did not eat the entire burger, and samples were sent to the state crime lab to find out what was in or on the burger that made Adams sick. The results have not been released.

Union City public information officer George Louth said Bull was charged with reckless conduct because she served the burger "without regards to the well-being of anyone who might consume it."

Union City police are still investigating.

Anonymous said...

i think the 16th century frenchman referred to above is Etienne de la Boettie.

Anonymous said...

TAYLOR, you hypocrite, stop using the gov't subsidized web. Ron Paul was DRAFTED when he was 28, geez...

ERS please, murder is murder.

ANONYMOUS, you're talking about a burger? Is that you Huckabeast? Remember, there's a fat you inside struggling to get out!

What is this people, an A.D.D. unfocus meeting?

Please honor Mr. G's point: Help us all; help Ron Paul

Anonymous said...

I consistantly enjoy and appreciate Will and Pro Libertate more than any other blog on the internet. He is the Thomas Paine of our generation and the comparison of Huckabee and Ron Paul is no exception.

You can vote for Ron Paul in the Free Market Hall of Fame Poll of legislators and government officials at http://www.freedomfest.com/halloffame and read and sign the Ron Paul Is Right – Abolish the Federal Reserve Petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/fed/petition.html

Keep up the good work.
Ron

Unknown said...

I have a few comments about Ron Paul.

I admit that he says the right things and in my younger days I would have been a fervent supporter. I would have even sent financial support.

However, I now consider that he is still receiving stolen funds for his "services," and is functioning within a very corrupt system. It is a system that is beyond reform and must eventually be abolished.

I believe it is misguided for folks to place a large amount of hope in one man, especially one within the belly of the beast. No bureaucrat will ever really change much, if anything, for the better.

The best hope is to rely on oneself for any meaningful change. No one ever really succeeded with the motto,"In government we trust."

healtheland said...

Wow! Beware though, some "Ron Paul is a racist" scuttlebutt is getting traction. http://healtheland.wordpress.com/tag/ron-paul/

William N. Grigg said...

Yes, one can always tell who the REAL racists are: They're the ones who want to STOP killing brown-skinned foreigners, or to avoid killing them in the first place.

William N. Grigg said...

BTW, Healtheland -- You have a very well-stocked and most interesting blog!

Anonymous said...

The more Huckabee talks of his honor the faster we'd better count our spoons.

Anonymous said...

RE "That crime is compounded by mass murder -- the death through state-sanctioned violence of American troops, Iraqi soldiers, Iraqi civilian non-combatants, and those legitimate resistance fighters who have taken up arms against the foreign invaders illegally occupying their country."

1. Do you have a breakdown of about what percentage of all the civilian Iraqi casualties were due to offensive American fire? I've always been curious about that.

2. Technically, no, we shouldn't have gone because it was unconstitutional, but for a while the argument was made that the casualties were less than they would have been had Saddam Hussein simply remained in power. As long as that held true, this illegal war could be said to at least have brought some good results.

By "legitimate resistance fighters," do you mean some group that doesn't blow up children? I don't hear about them much.

The soldiers there I'm sure hope to do some good. The easiest way to not get shot at by Americans is to not attack them. Germany was also occupied by the Americans, but since no one attacked them, no innocent civilians died, proving that an occupying American presence can be peaceful, if the other side isn't crazy. (I'm not talking about Operation Keelhaul, here.)

Anonymous said...

"Once again I find myself wondering if such a facility is a mandatory prerequisite for those seeking to occupy the large, tacky building at 1800 Center Street in Little Rock."

Actually, it seems to be a mandatory prerequisite for those seeking to occupy any of the 'large, tacky buildings' in each capital city of each state and in the national capital as well. And, unfortunately, it tends to be the ones with the greatest propensity for that facility which end up achieving that desired occupancy. None of that 'lesser evil' will be tolerated.

The wisdom in Douglas Adams' quote (“Anyone who is capable of getting himself elected president should on no account be allowed to do the job.”) is just proven more and more all the time.