Second, in order to pay for everything else Huckabee supports, the FairTax would either have to be far more revenue-enhancing than its mainstream supporters profess, or at a much higher rate than anybody wants to see, or it would have to fail to supplant the income tax altogether.

Or he could just run massive deficits like the current and most recent former high-(deferred-)tax Administrations.

Third, of all the things Huckabee supports, the one thing that he claims makes him conservative is also the one thing least likely to make it through a Congress almost certain to still be Democrat-controlled.

Right, the only way I see getting to any fiscal responsibility is to get back a Republican Congress, and the only way that is going to happen before 2013 is if a polarizing Democrat is elected President. Even if it were possible for the GOP to take back Congress without Hillary in the next eight years, a GOP Congress and President don't seem to be a formula for responsibility either because Congress spends to make the President look good and the President doesn't veto enough of the bills passed by his friends.

Calling global warming a “moral issue” mandating “a biblical duty” to prevent climate change,

Dictionary.com defines conservative as "disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change." Novak's mindset that the Republican party must reflexively be against environmental protection is bad for the party, bad for the planet, and bad for conservatism. Too often these days people are confusing that regulations that are bad for a few specific business plans but good for the health of the country as a whole are "bad for business" and therefore should be opposed by Republicans. I don't see the virtue in the name of "free markets" in allowing a very few private interests to reduce the wealth of the rest of us by dumping mercury in rivers or demolishing entire mountains, while most businesses and Wall St. Journal readers care more about going to the lake on the weekend rather than wishing they could dredge it. So I welcome Huckabee's language, although I don't know much about his actual positions on the issue.

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How could someone who wants to get rid of the IRS, which Huckabee's fair tax initiative would do, be thought of as someone who loves Big Government?

First, it's not Mike Huckabee's FairTax initiative -- he's simply embraced it as a way of catching people's attention in his presidential bid.

Second, in order to pay for everything else Huckabee supports, the FairTax would either have to be far more revenue-enhancing than its mainstream supporters profess, or at a much higher rate than anybody wants to see, or it would have to fail to supplant the income tax altogether.

Third, of all the things Huckabee supports, the one thing that he claims makes him conservative is also the one thing least likely to make it through a Congress almost certain to still be Democrat-controlled.

On 2/12/95 an article Ralph Z. Harlow from the Washington Times wrote under the caption "Conservatives Hold Fire On Abortion" the Huckster said this:
"In the spirit of federalism, the proposed GOP revision also would replace the abortion amendment with a statement saying the issue should be left up to the individual state legislatures to deal with as each sees fit. 'That's exactly what we have looked for, and if it's left up to the states, more of them are going to put some restrictions on abortion,' Arkansas Lt. Gov. Mike Huckabee said in an interview after appearing on a conference panel yesterday."

On 4/ 2006 in an interview with John Hawkins on RightWing News the Huckster was talking the same talk: http://www.rightwingnews.com/interviews/huckabee.php

"It would please me because I think Roe v. Wade is based on a real stretch of Constitutional application — that somehow there is a greater privacy issue in the abortion concern — than there is a human life issue — and that the federal government should be making that decision as opposed to states making that decision. So, I’ve never felt that it was a legitimate manner in which to address this and, first of all, it should be left to the states, the 10th Amendment, but secondly, to somehow believe that the taking of an innocent, unborn human life is about privacy and not about that unborn life is ludicrous."

BUT then on 11/19/07;
Huckabee Rejects Letting States Decide Whether to Allow Abortions
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,312107,00.html

"If morality is the point here, and if it’s right or wrong, not just a political question, then you can’t have 50 different versions of what’s right and what’s wrong."

"For those of us for whom this is a moral question, you can’t simply have 50 different versions of what’s right,"he said in an interview on Fox News Sunday."

What an unbelievable con-artist this puke is!

The collapse of the Soviet Union weakened this coalition and helped make the election of Bill Clinton possible. The 9/11 attacks again made national security Priority One for conservatives and again made it necessary for evangelicals and the Chamber of Commerce crowd to band together.

I'm not so sure national security is "Priority One," for the Chamber of Commerce crowd, if by that you mean the particular formula for national security espoused by any serious Republican over any serious Democrat. The more accurate statement would seem to be that 9/11 refertilized the ground for the Chamber of Commerce to seek votes for its candidates from evangelicals who may not directly care much about the Wall Street agenda.

I also think it is a great oversimplication to say that Bill Clinton's election was made possible by the collapse of the USSR. Voters like change every once in awhile, and the GOP had won 5 of 6 Presidential elections going into 1992, there was a recession, and the Democrats ran a stronger candidate than they had in a generation. I suppose that if the USSR was as strong as ever in 1992 and tensions were red hot, that Clinton's lack of foreign policy experience wouldn't have compared well to Bush's and that may have turned votes that year. But I don't think one can contend that if the USSR had remained strong the Democrats never would have never won a Presidential election again.

The rise of evangelical Christians as the force that blasted the GOP out of minority status during the past generation always contained an inherent danger: What if these new Republican acolytes supported not merely a conventional conservative but one of their own?

Yeah, that always terrified me in the 1980s and 1990s. Then in 2000 it actually happened, Novak is quite late in smelling the stench. Sure, Bush and Huckabee differ on various issues but the basic problem is the same: the party has abandoned small government. Perhaps the problem is that many supposed small government advocates of the past only took that position because they weren't the ones who were running it. It apparently is a rare breed who would actually have the power of government at their fingertips and still be conservative in their use of it to regulate the markets or people's private lives.

Huckabee is campaigning as a conservative, but serious Republicans know that he is a high-tax, protectionist advocate of big government and a strong hand in the Oval Office directing the lives of Americans.

Change the phrase to "high-borrowing," and it's no different than the authoritarian currently in residence at the White House.

I think that Ronald Reagan was a plain, old-fashioned Red fighter. That aspect of his administration makes coherent sense of his entire political career uniting rhetoric with action.