May 10^th

This morning’s paper has a column by the right wing intellectual George Will, that’s Dr. George Will who holds, rather tightly I expect, a doctorate from Oxford University. Now earning that degree is no mean feat; this is not an honorary doctorate from the likes of Liberty University. Will’s tour de force this morning is an extensive commentary on Mike Huckabee. Will titles his piece “The apostle Mike Huckabee.”

Will spends a couple of paragraphs at the outset talking about Adlai Stevenson. It seems that Stevenson had been invited to speak at Norman Vincent Peale’s spectacularly successful church. Peale was vociferously opposed to Jack Kennedy’s candidacy because he was Catholic and he had been opposed to Stevenson because he was divorced. Stevenson was told that his audience had been instructed by Peale to vote for his opponent. Probably sensing that he would get no support from Peale’s people anyway, Stevenson said, “I find the apostle Paul appealing and the apostle Peale appalling.” Stevenson would have made a delightful President; his press conferences would have been at least as much fun as Jack Kennedy’s were.

Will then goes after Huckabee for a number of exquisitely idiotic assertions: Huckabee claims the massacre of school children at Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012 was the result of “removing God from our public schools so should we be surprised that they have become a place of carnage?”  I suppose the fact that this psychotic killer murdered his own mother after stealing her weapons was surely due to her lax church attendance! But then Will asks if the slaughter of twelve people at an Aurora Colorado movie theatre was the result of inadequate praying at America’s Cineplexes?

At this point in Will’s comments we should probably note something:  Will is straying from, nay abolishing, Reagan’s eleventh commandment, “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican.”  Reagan’s position here could easily destroy the Republican Party because if no one “speaks ill” of any other Republican the party will be frozen in time; there will be no change. The demographics of this country are very different from those in Reagan’s era but the Republican Party has not accommodated to that fact.

Will closes by saying, “For Republicans worried about broadening their party’s base there is one word for Huckabee’s stance: Appalling” He’s right of course and some of us couldn’t be happier.