Stephen Colbert's guest on Wednesday's Réport was Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, and the first thing I have to say is, it's good to have Colbert back on the air. In the interview, Huckabee not only reiterated his pledge to nominate Colbert as his V.P., he promised to go beyond the gates of Hell to pursue Osama bin Laden: "I will charge Hell with a water pistol, if necessary." He criticized the environmental record of the Bush Administration, was noncommittal about evolution, endorsed RKBA, and opposed gay marriage. But the one bit of satire that might really bite him in the ass was his faux "admission" that he financed his campaign through the illegal interstate sale of firearms.
I've posted a transcript on my blog, "The Third Path," along with a bit more of my own commentary and analysis. Here's the tail end of the piece on my blog:
A few comments on Huckabee's responses:
- I would very much like to know, and therefore I call upon Mike Huckabee to disclose, to what extent The Colbert Réport prepped him for the interview. If Huckabee knew the questions in advance, he still handled them well, but if he was doing improv on the spot, then it was especially impressive.
- In the unlikely event that Huckabee is nominated as President, the selection of his running mate will have more immediate impact than usual, simply because the way Huckabee backs out of his repeated commitment to Stephen Colbert will say a lot about his character and fitness to be President. Sure, he can say, "It was all in a spirit of fun on a program of satire," but the details will matter. Anyone in politics who underestimates the power of Stephen Colbert will learn to regret it.
- I think that Huckabee's comment that he would "charge Hell with a water pistol, if necessary," in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, speaks more to a fundamental understanding of the struggle against Al Qaeda than any of the façade of macho posturing from the likes of Romney and Giuliani about the extremes to which they would cheerfully go to defeat those extremists.
- I agree with Gov. Huckabee and the character of Stephen Kohl-Behr that the [Mormon] belief that Jesus and the Devil are brothers is almost as absurd as the [Scientology®] belief that an interstellar overlord exiled prisoners' "thetans" on earth. However, I saw a quote today that pretty well sums up my attitude towards "mainline" Christianity, and especially fundamentalist Christianity:
CHRISTIANITY: The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father, can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree... yeah, makes perfect sense. — found on the masthead of the Myth Understood channel on Justin.TV; original source unspecified
It is absurd, and even blasphemous, to suggest that any human could ever have an infallible understanding of "the will of God," if any God worthy of the capital G exists.
- It's about non-existent-deity-darned time that some Republican make the simple admission that the Republican leadership of the last 7 years has done a lousy job on environmental issues, and that it's important that we turn around right now. "Frankly, we need to take better care of this planet."
- Even in jest, claiming to have financed his campaign through the illegal interstate sale of weapons, is tap-dancing in a political minefield. It's not a good first step in bridging the divide between the RKBA'ers and the people who are horrified at the rate of death from gun violence in the United States.
- Huckabee's ability to grapple with Colbert clearly places him in an intellectual league far beyond President George Dumbya Bush. The pundits who have been saying for nine years, "Oh, George W. Bush isn't stupid!" are just as wide of the mark as the polls that said Obama would carry New Hampshire by double digits. Bush didn't for a moment consider how he would get the United States back out again after we invaded Iraq, which showed a shocking failure to think through the consequences of his decisions. Huckabee's inability or refusal to embrace the core concept of Evolution, though, likewise shows some limitations of his mind.
I hope you'll check out the transcript, and maybe also the rest of my blog!