May 12^th

On Sunday I watched the duck ‘n’ dodge performance of a combative Carly Fiorina on “Meet the Press.”  The woman is truly unique; she claims she regrets nothing because she has made no mistakes. H-Ps stock went down because all tech stocks went down, firings were just part of her necessary executive decisions and her own firing was part of a board room brawl. (Which is not really an explanation.) As a company executive she makes a great politician. Only one person would I rather see getting the Republican nomination and that is Donald Trump. If Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson or Mike Huckabee are nominated a win is guaranteed for any two-legged Democratic selection. They are all draining off support money that might have gone to more dangerous candidates. (Carly got 20 million dollars of severance from H-P but what with living expenses and all…)

Let’s look at this triumvirate and note how nicely balanced it is. Carly Fiorina is the only woman candidate in the race so far, and no other woman seems to be waiting in the wings for a nudge forward. While Carly seems to lack some of the concern for the underdog and the downtrodden we usually associate with women, there is no doubt that Carly is a woman. Score one for Republican diversity.

Then there is Ben Carson and there is no doubt that Dr. Carson is Black. It is also clear that he has been a very well regarded pediatric neurosurgeon; and it is clear that he now practices a profession in a hospital which, fifty-five years ago, before the liberal efforts of the sixties, would have had him cleaning the restrooms instead of working miracles in the surgical suites. No matter, he regularly appears on Fox news to bash the political party which allowed him his profession and doing it in a very unpleasant way. Dr. Carson has some unorthodox views on science. He believes that evolution is a “myth” and that man was created just six thousand years ago. He doesn’t say why he disagrees with various dating methods that put the emergence of homo sapiens at 200 thousand years ago. It appears that Carson is much more of a fundamentalist in his religious view as Mike Huckabee, the next person I discuss.

Huckabee sees the possibility of intelligent design as a solution to the puzzle of creation. He claims that the theory of evolution is just that, nothing but a theory. It seems the Baptist University which provided his undergraduate education did not help his understanding of scientific theories. When it comes to evolution Huckabee doesn’t believe that children should be “indoctrinated” into believing it. Other kinds of indoctrination are apparently OK. Huckabee’s views on same sex marriage and other LGBT issues can be construed as “traditional.” As I have said in a previous post, for all his Christian posturing he is quite willing to present misleading data if misleading his audience is in his interests. He continues to insist that Obama is anti-religion and uses no real evidence for that claim. I’ve already noted his distortion by claiming 93 million unemployed in this country as a result of counting retirees and school children who are hardly looking for work.  Huckabee is an embarrassment to the Republican Party and to the great majority of Christians.

Even so, these three, Fiorina, Carson and Huckabee give the Republican candidate field remarkable diversity.