Jon Carroll on Huckabee & Romney

I have become obsessed with Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. Not that I would ever vote for either of them. Mitt Romney looks like the typical high school suck-up, the kid whom everyone hated, although everyone also conceded that he'd go far. He also had Daddy's money, and he looked as if he had Daddy's money.

There is also the Mormon thing. One part of the American experiment that I really agree with is that everyone should be free to believe any damn thing they want, and to worship any damn thing they want, as long as it doesn't scare the horses. People say,

Oh, that Joseph Smith, what a hoaxster; can you believe people actually bought into that 'golden plates in the backyard' thing?

Well, yeah. Can you believe that people actually bought into that "it's really the blood of Jesus" thing? Can you believe people bought into that "the Prophet went into a cave and the angel Gabriel dictated an entire book to him" thing? Can you believe that people bought into that "here's a holy imaginary elephant - build a shrine!" thing?

I mean, it's a religion. It's not supposed to make sense. It's a matter of faith, and I just ain't going to get into the business of weighing faiths. Let a thousand Mormons bloom, not that they need my permission. Or want it.

The trouble is that Romney does want to weigh faiths. Or, at least, lack of faith. Here he is in the famous speech about his Mormon religion that mentioned the word "Mormon" only once:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

Jeez, I'd think just the opposite is true - that freedom rather specifically does not require religion, because freedom concerns the right to be, you know, free. Mitt is free to believe in Joseph Smith's revelation and wear his holy singlet; I am free to believe in charity, kindness and peace without attaching it to any supernatural being.

I am free to use anything at all to open the windows of my soul. If it happens to be the sight of a golden retriever on the beach at Limantour at sunset, they're my windows and it's my soul and government has nothing to do with it. Mitt Romney does not get to define the terms of my enlightenment - or, indeed, my freedom to ignore enlightenment if that's what I choose to do. Because it's freedom.

I am not yelling.

I have to say that Mike Huckabee won my heart for about 30 seconds. It was at the You Tube-CNN Republican debate, and all the candidates were taking turns decrying immigrants as vile and loathsome criminals and perverts, and if we could only get rid of them then all our country's problems would be solved. (How to get rid of them? Oh, don't bother me when I'm demagoguing.) One part of the anti-immigrant package was to deny the children of illegal immigrants education, health care and common human decency.

In the middle of the hate fest, Huckabee said:

With all due respect, we're a better country than to punish children for what their parents did.

And he got booed! And I thought: Two hours of blather, one guy says something that makes him sound like a human being, and he gets attacked. Lordy, these are dreadful people.

But then I read other things that Huckabee said:

I didn't get into politics because I thought government had a better answer. I got into politics because I knew government didn't have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives.

That's going to be a little tricky when monetary policy is being discussed, because Christ's position on reducing Chinese imports is not entirely clear. That's all right: Huckabee had not even heard about the National Intelligence Estimate's report on Iran's nuclear program; probably he was so busy letting Jesus Christ into his life that he forgot to let current events into his life.

Huckabee also said he wanted to "answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ." I'm not sure what that means, but it can't be good for the Jews. Or the gays, for that matter. Huckabee is opposed to gays in the military because they would "destroy unit cohesion," which is actually what people said about African Americans in 1947, until Harry Truman said, "Cohesion this, pea brains" and integrated the armed forces for good.

It's a measure of where George Bush has taken the Republican Party that only nut jobs can run for the GOP nomination. The sanest one out there is a former POW, and he thinks the Iraq war is a great idea. And you think Hillary Clinton is going to have trouble running against one of these guys? Please.

I love it when the mean kids get on television and yell at each other for a while. Keeps them out of the playground.

San Francisco Chronicle
I hear the human race is falling on its face and hasn't very far to go, but every whippoorwill is selling me a bill and telling me it just ain't so. I could say life is just a bowl of Jello, and appear more intelligent and smart, but I'm stuck like a dope with a thing called hope, and I can't get it out of my jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.