"My faith is my life -- it defines me. I don't separate my faith from my personal and professional lives," he says on his campaign Web site.
Indeed, a taste for how Huckabee would intertwine faith and state came early into his foray in government. When asked why he chose to move from his position as pastor of Arkansas' 490,000-person Southern Baptist church into a life of politics, he said he did so at the behest of a higher power. "I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ."[...]
In 1998 he signed a statement urging wives to "graciously submit to their husband's sacrificial leadership."
[...]
He hired church groups to run welfare and youth programs. When the Arkansas' divorce rate skyrocketed, Huckabee turned to his Baptist roots, instituting "covenant marriages," which encouraged training on healthy relationships and made it harder for people to divorce. Even the cars in Arkansas bore Huckabee's religious fingerprint. In March 2003, he approved, as several other governors had, specialty license plates with a "Choose Life" message on them.
[...]
[A]t a rally for a group called Put God Back in Public School, he was videotaped offering his support for the idea of a "public Christian school."
[...]
[However,] Huckabee signed off on legislation to significantly expand gambling at Arkansas' historic racetracks, despite obvious religious objections. Without the measure the sites would have gone under, and jobs and revenue would have been lost. Huckabee, even his supporters admit, simply chose pragmatism over faith.
[...]
Asked to explain his recent rise in the polls, he once again resorted to the providential. "There's only one explanation for it," Huckabee proclaimed, "and it's not a human one."
Sadly, it’s all too human. Mike Huckabee is a shameless panderer.
Huckabee used God as a prop in a 2004 Republican Governors Association Dinner speech, pretending to take a phone call from him on stage. (YouTube)
He's also a liar and a fool. Cliff Schecter records three times that Huckabee has publicly stated he has a Theologian’s Degree. Did he think no one would check? Joe Carter, Huckabee's director of research, had to send out an email correcting the thrice-told lie:
Governor Huckabee doesn’t have a theology degree. He only spent a year in seminary.
Whatever his religious character flaws may be, at least we know Huckabee is experienced in the great tradition of political secretiveness:
Huckabee depleted the governor's emergency fund before he left office, the state Bureau of Legislative Research reported, including spending $13,000 to have computer hard drives in his office crushed.
And playing funny with the money:
Huckabee, in his political debut, was preparing to become the Bible-thumping, abortion-decrying Republican challenger to U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers, the Democratic incumbent. With a playbook straight out of James Dobson, he tried to portray Bumpers as a pornographer for his support of federal grants to the arts.[...]
In the 1992 contest with Bumpers, Huckabee used campaign funds to pay himself as his own media consultant. Other payments went to the family babysitter.
In his successful 1994 run for lieutenant governor, he set up a nonprofit curtain known as Action America so he could give speeches for money without having to disclose the names of his benefactors. He failed to report that campaign travel payments were for the use of his own personal plane.
After he became governor in 1996, he raked in tens of thousands of dollars in gifts, including gifts from people he later appointed to prestigious state commissions.
[...]
Furniture he'd received to doll up his office was carted out with him when he left, after he'd crushed computer hard drives so nobody could ever get a peek behind the curtain of the Huckabee administration.
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Until [...] the Arkansas Times blew the whistle, he converted a governor's mansion operating account into a personal expense account, claiming public money for a doghouse, dry-cleaning bills, panty hose and meals at Taco Bell.
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He ran the State Police airplane into the ground, many of the miles in pursuit of political ends. Inauguration funds were used to buy clothing for his wife. He once took control of the state Republican Party's campaign account -- then swore the account had been somebody else's responsibility when it ran afoul of federal election laws.
[...]
Three decades after the Huckabees' wedding, his wife registered at department stores so their new home, post-governor's mansion, could be stocked with gifts of linens, toasters and other suitable furnishings.
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[U]ltimately Huckabee ended press services, which are publicly financed, to […] the Arkansas Times.
We also know that, like Bush, he is qualified to pander to the Religious Right without really meeting their demands.
He professed opposition to alcohol and gambling, but he allowed passage of legislation that made it easier for restaurants to obtain private-club mixed-drink permits in dry counties. Over the angry objection of the church lobby, he sped final action on a bill to allow video poker at the state's racetracks, an act followed not long afterward by a $10,000 campaign contribution from the owner of the state's biggest race track, at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs.
He also, like Bush, surrounds himself with other schoolyard bullies.
Back in August, following the circulation of an anti-Catholic letter by a Huckabee-supporting Iowa pastor (to which Catholic then-presidential contender Sam Brownback took offense), the Huckabee camp refused to apologize. Instead, they urged Brownback to show "Christian character" and "stop whining."
Because Catholic-bashing shows so much Christian character.
Huckabee studied theology as a seminarian, yet when asked about Mormonism he becomes a country bumpkin who doesn't know anything beyond the rumors he has heard. He apologizes later -- as he did this week for his false suggestion that Mormons believe Satan is Jesus's brother -- but by then, of course, the damage is done. Huckabee could easily allay fundamentalist voters' qualms about Romney's beliefs, or at least put them in context. He chooses not to.That doesn't strike me as a very Christian way for an ordained minister to behave.
Well, no. But there’s a lot in religious practices that isn’t very Christian, and Huckabee is a politician and a panderer.
....hey, believe what you want....you will anyway.
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