Coming This Fall: 'Law & Order--Hate Crimes Unit'

These people even scare each other.

Nat Hentoff, who is a liberal but somehow remains unhypnotized on life issues and free speech, can’t believe that the press and the ACLU aren’t making a peep while Congress and the Obama administration are pushing through hate-crimes legislation that will “make it a federal crime to willfully cause bodily injury (or try to) because of the victim's actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability’”. ("Hentoff: 'Thought crimes' bill advances"):

The extra punishment applies only to these "protected classes." As Denver criminal defense lawyer Robert J Corry Jr. asked (Denver Post April 28): "Isn't every criminal act that harms another person a 'hate crime'? Then, regarding a Colorado "hate crime" law, one of 45 such state laws, Corry wrote: "When a Colorado gang engaged in an initiation ritual of specifically seeking out a "white woman" to rape, the Boulder prosecutor declined to pursue 'hate crime' charges." She was not enough of one of its protected classes.

Corey adds that the state "hate crime" law - like the newly expanded House of Representatives federal bill - "does not apply equally" (as the 14th Amendment requires), essentially instead "criminalizing only politically incorrect thoughts directed against politically incorrect victim categories."

Whether you're a Republican or Democrat, think hard about what Corry adds: "A government powerful enough to pick and choose which thoughts to prosecute is a government too powerful."

But aren’t Conyers, Leahy, and Feinstein already doing this by claiming Department of Justice lawyers have broken the law by forming opinions on the definition of torture that the Democrats don’t like?

By extending an extra layer of legal protections to the specified victim classes, it also leaves the rest of us with lesser protection. I’m old and a person of color (white), so you can beat the hell out of me without it being a hate crime.

I have to wonder why the usual protections for age have been left out of this turkey? Maybe someone figured out they can’t have some cranky geezer who’s being denied Obama’s rationed health care saying he’s a victim of a hate crime. And since willfully causing bodily injury to an unborn or recently-born child because he’s “unwanted”--and a huge inconvenience because of his age-- qualifies as a hate crime, what could that do to the Roe v Wade regime?

Anti-Torture Picture Lacks Definition

Cliff May has a post at NRO Online that addresses the dishonest element that runs through all of the recent whip-up about "torture." There's also some details about how Islamists respond to harsh interrogation:

Re: Not Pro-Torture, Just Pro-Facts [Cliff May]

Andrew Sullivan has a post up on his Daily Dish taking a shot at me as well. He begins by saying generously: “Cliff May has done great work over the years advancing democracy and defending human rights.” He goes on to link to one of my Corner posts and to say that my “defense of torture when and only when America does it deeply undermines his credibility and makes a mockery of his previous work.”

In fact, in just about everything I’ve written and said, I’ve taken pains to emphasize that I oppose torture. However, I do think (1) it’s important to define torture so we know what we are talking about, and (2) all forms of “stress and duress” utilized to elicit cooperation from a terrorist in possession of life-saving information are not torture.

Every opponent I’ve debated on has taken this tactic — labeling me as “pro-torture,” refusing to grapple with definitions, and refusing to consider whether there may be methods of interrogation that are unpleasant but fall short of torture.

This is especially important because we now know that Islamists believe their religion forbids them to cooperate with infidels — until they have reached the limit of their ability to endure the hardships the infidel is inflicting on them.* In other words: Imagine an al-Qaeda member who would like to give his interrogators information, who does not want continue fighting, who would prefer not to see more innocent people slaughtered. He would need his interrogators to press him hard so he can feel that he has met his religious obligations — only then could he cooperate.

But just try to get anyone in the “anti-torture” camp to seriously debate any of this.

* “Brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardships.” — Abu Zubaydah, quoted in released CIA memos

Free Press Cartoonist Tortures the Truth

Detroit Free Press editorial cartoonist Mike Thompson gives us a two-fer this Sunday by both blogging and illustrating his feelings about what he terms “CIA torture.”

Maybe we can call this treatment of readers, "inkboarding." I know I often have the feeling I'm drowning in deliberately misleading journalism.

On his Freep blog he writes:

This country thought it important enough to investigate and prosecute a president for leaving his DNA all over some intern's dress, but will take a pass when it comes to investigating and prosecuting illegal acts of torture and potential war crimes?

What is wrong with us?

I don't know about "us," but as for Thompson, what is wrong with him--if his cartoon is any indicator--is he lacks a serious enough grasp of the most basic facts to be trusted with "investigating and prosecuting" anybody.

Sure, artistic license is okay when you draw political cartoons. Sometimes you have to exaggerate the truth to make it easier for some people not to miss it. But when you track back that exaggeration, it has to go back to an actual truth. Especially when the cartoon is intended not so much to poke fun or ridicule, but to accuse actual persons of "war crimes."

Spattered blood, burning coals, tongs, chains, rotting skeletons? (OK, maybe Conyers does dress up that way, but I wouldn't know).

Now you may happen to hold the high moral view that waterboarding is the pinnacle of human cruelty, the descent to which, regardless of the urgency of circumstances, earns the United States automatic excommunication from that greater community of decent nations that includes Cuba, the Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, France, and China. But your high moral view doesn't give you the right to simply make up facts because they match the emotional shock you claim to feel.

That Thompson believes he can simply insert any image he wants to illustrate the term "torture"--no matter how barbaric an image and outside the wildest charges ever concocted by critics of the war against jihad--is exactly why the Left can never be trusted to fairly go at "investigating and prosecuting." They aren't interested in investigating, only prosecuting.

The truth is that the Left has been shouting, and reporting, and especially misreporting, about U.S. "torture" of terrorist detainees since 2003. The Democratic Congress has been threatening war-crimes trials since 2006. Almost every pertinent detail about the handling of these few al-Qaeda terrorists has been disclosed, reported, decribed, analyzed, and digested. I know because I've been following it every step of the way. As have some exceptionally smart people like Andrew McCarthy. There is really nothing left to investigate.

But when the Democrats don't get the result they want, they just keep repeating demands for more investigations. Believe me, if Ford hadn't pardoned Nixon, there'd still be a sitting Watergate Committee.

And it isn't only the "CIA torture" that Thompson's misnformed about. He still thinks repeating that "Clinton was impeached for having sex" is a going argument. (What am I saying? It is still a going argument! A poll of C-SPAN callers found this the second most likely thing to be said by Democratics, closely following "Bush lied us into this war.")

As should be obvious by now, the release of no amount of information will actually change the minds of any of the stooges, like Mike Thompson, who actually believe there is evidence of medieval-era torture dungeons with bloody walls, racks, and breaking wheels. To minds so willing to believe only the worst, and so incapable of processing what actually happened, investigations are a waste of time, and an invitation to criminalizing political opinions that vary from those on the Left.

Coming Soon To an Executive Office Near You!

For those of you who voted for Obama, you need to realize that he's just made his first decisions as Commander in Chief (Elect).

They're weak, folks. And I'm not just being snarky. I'm never snarky.

I'm referring to his announced intentions, reported in Politico and elsewhere, to order the closing of the detention camp at Guantanamo, and other “dramatic gestures aimed at reversing President Bush’s accumulation of executive power.” (“44 to reverse 43's executive orders.”)

I consider it a bad sign that, as Commander-in-Chief Elect, Obama’s first actions include publicly declaring his intention to weaken the office of the President--whether it’s vis-à-vis Congress, or vis-à-vis our still very determined jihadist enemies.

You see folks, he's not weakening George W. Bush. Bush will be a private citizen at 12:01 pm next Wednesday. Obama is announcing that he's weakening his own powers, and he's doing it before he has even assumed them.

Rather than firmly grasping the reins of leadership the Constitution intends the President to hold, Obama seems to want the likes of Reid, Pelosi, Leahy, Frank, Conyers, and Maxine Waters holding them with him—collectively riding off in all directions at once, especially away from the battle.

The whole purpose of executive authority is to mitigate the blunt reality that Congress is incapable of acting with the gravity, speed, and singleness of purpose needed in times of war. And this goes triple for a Congress with a Democratic majority. The duplicity of Congressional Democrats leading up to the Iraq War authorization demonstrates how craven hacks like John Edwards, John Kerry, and others were perfectly capable of bombastically supporting the overthrow of a dictatorship when the decision was popular, and then were shrieking a year later that it was the stupidest and most deceitful foreign policy decision since man began keeping written records of his deeds.

This is why the Constitution vests the executive with command of the military. (Yes, I know, Congress has the authority to declare war—but this is a power it hasn’t exercised, I’m pretty certain, since 1941. Nor, for that matter, are declarations of war much heard of these days anywhere else, either, regardless of whether they should be or not. When bin Laden declared war on us in 1996, no one paid attention).

Andrew McCarthy characterizes Obama’s empty Guantanamo gesture this way:

The Guantánamo ‘executive’ order should instead be called a ‘symbolic’order since it is not intended to execute anything. Guantanamo will continue operating just as it has. Mr. Obama’s stated desire to close it at some future point is the same desire members of the Bush administration have been stating for some time.

The Politico writers hit a key point when they describe Obama’s moves as “dramatic gestures.” But dramatic gestures are not political leadership, but political theater.

Grasp the centrality of political theater to the governing style of Democrats, and they will never really surprise you again.

But, you say, Obama’s “dramatic gestures” will also include “ending the torture of detainees.” That's substance isn't it?

No. It's only more theater. The thing is, if we aren’t presently “torturing” detainees in any meaningful sense, i.e., as defined under law by Congress, (and even waterboarding--which isn't illegal--hasn’t been used in several years). Ending something that isn't there is what I call a truly empty gesture.

And it’s not as if Congress is going to get any braver under an Obama administration by actually passing legislation specifying what is and isn’t torture, (the way they never did under Bush—in spite of five years of accusing Bush of being out of control and above the law). So in the end, “ending the torture of detainees” will amount to nothing more than symbolic declamations meant to satisfy the UN, Human Rights Watch, and other Euro-types who never saved anyone from terrorism. The only ones who can give these gestures substance will be the terrorists plotting jihad against us: they'll digest it instantly as us losing our nerve.

Gestures will not stop jihadists.

How Else Not To Fight Terrorism

On December 11, Michigan’s Democratic Senator-for-Life, Carl Levin, released yet one more report styled an “Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody.”

Last Friday’s Detroit News summarized it as follows:

Officials at the top of the Bush administration bear the blame for use of interrogation tactics on military detainees that were designed to help U.S. troops endure torture at enemy hands, says a report released Thursday by a Senate panel chaired by Sen. Carl Levin.

The report, the product of a two-year investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee, means the Obama administration “needs to look for ways in which people can be held accountable for their actions,’ Levin said in an interview Thursday.

(“Report pins detainee abuse on Rumsfeld”).

When Levin calls on the incoming administration to work for “ways in which people can be held accountable,” he means people like U.S. military interrogators, intelligence officers, and political officials charged with protecting the American people. That jihadist detainees may face consequences for their efforts, some of them successful, to kill us is completely absent from the analysis.

Read the News article, or Levin’s report, and you’ll never known that the captured jihadists, whom he refers to only as “detainees in U.S. custody,” are anything more than victims of American civil-rights violations. For all we can learn from Levin’s 19-page lecture, we don’t know why or how these men became “detainees in U.S. custody,” or if they share any more culpability in their situation than orphans trapped in a corrupt and inefficient foster-care system.

For example, here is how Levin’s Executive Summary disposes of the phenomenon of Islamic jihadist terrorism: “Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists are taught to expect Americans to abuse them. They are recruited based on false propaganda that says the United States is out to destroy Islam. Treating detainees harshly only reinforces that distorted view, increases resistance to cooperation, and creates new enemies.”

The editors at National Review had a swift and potent response to Levin’s report, (“Torturing the Evidence”), that skewers Levin’s report as “flawed in its fundamental assumptions and fictional in its sweeping conclusions.”

The document, the editors write, is only “the latest chapter in the Democrats’ torture narrative — a warped tale that trivializes true torture by confounding it with less extreme forms of interrogation. The committee thoroughly misrepresents the legal standards that govern detainee treatment and ignores non-partisan investigations that have found no evidence of a systematic program of abuse.”

Moreover, Levin’s report falsifies the history of our detainee and interrogation policies, in order to blame any possible wrongdoing exclusively on Rumsfeld, Bush, and Republicans:

In September 2002, senior leaders on the Senate and House intelligence committees — Democrats and Republicans — began receiving briefings on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program,” including the use of waterboarding on top al-Qaeda operatives. Among the leaders briefed was Nancy Pelosi, now speaker of the House.

The lawmakers raised no objections. According to Porter Goss, a congressman at that time and later head of the CIA, their chief concern was whether “the methods were tough enough.” But Carl Levin, the Democrat who runs the Senate Armed Services Committee, managed to suppress any mention of Speaker Pelosi and her congressional colleagues last week when his committee released its misleading and relentlessly partisan report, titled “Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody.”

I find Levin’s action all the more odious as this kind of incendiary propaganda isn’t even timed to help Obama get elected. The object, as suggested in the News headline, was to "pin abuse on Rumsfeld." It is intended only to further slander the Bush administration, and to handcuff Obama so that he will lighten the pressure on Islamic radicals.

I believe there ought to be reasonable debate about what constitutes torture, and the levels to which those on the front lines--commanders primarily concerned with protecting their soldiers, and intelligence officials with a duty to protect innocent people from attacks--can go to obtain information from captured jihadists.

But Democrats are no more capable of discussing that subject reasonably than they’ve been able to discuss America’s military strategy in response to 9/11. (“Quagmire!”--“Blood for oil!”--“Imperialism!”-- “Bush lied!!!”). For some reason Democrats just have to boil everything down to a simplistic invective meant to demonize Republicans in power, or to silence opposition from the minority when it is them in power.

Rather than foster a national discussion about the complex moral and political problem--and a never before encountered problem--of detaining and interrogating stateless, lawless, homicidal fanatics who think nothing of losing their own lives if it means killing infidels for Allah--the Left simply began screaming that we had no right to detain them at all if we’re not going to extend full protections to them as criminal defendants under the Bill of Rights. This is a profoundly stupid idea, and even Obama has been backpedaling away from it since it's his turn to tackle the problem now. This either/or approach always ends the discussion before it has a chance to begin.

Jack Bauer, Now More Than Ever

At least we can watch conservative values resurging in one place in America.

The Counter-Terrorism Unit’s most-fired employee, Jack Bauer, is returning this Sunday for a two-hour episode of 24. (“Jack's back: '24' returns with a two-hour, action-packed movie”).

As described by Detroit News reviewer, Mekeisha Madden Toby, Jack can’t be left in peace for all the well-intentioned idiots who keep dragging him back into a life of nonstop violence and use of his trademark counterterrorism skills.

His first battle is with bureaucrat Frank Trammell (Gil Bellows, "Ally McBeal"), who travels to the fictional African country of Sengala to tell Jack that he must return to the United States to answer for the inhumane torture techniques he used on terrorism suspects.

Disinterested in playing by rules he doesn't believe in, Jack has been running from people like Tramell for a year, we learn, but discovers he can't run forever. Despite such a revelation, Jack wastes no time physically and verbally attacking Tramell. In another scene, Jack does much of the same to a weak United Nations representative.

Ms. Toby’s snapshot is meant to capture the essential, violent Jack Bauer we all know and love. But it’s not just how Bauer pounds people that makes us love him, it’s who he pounds and why: A bureaucrat sent to hassle him because he tortured terrorists? (Pound him). One of Ally McBeal’s boytoy love interests? (Pound all of them ). A UN representative? (Pound, baby, pound!).

As show creator Joel Turnow said about Bauer’s appeal (and even prominent liberals admit loving this show),

in a world where there's so much noise about what we've done wrong, why we're such bad people, there's so little support for just the real common sense idea,which is: they're bad, we're good, we're going to get them. Jack Bauer represents that.

And he represents it, I might add, without ever having uttered a patriotic speech, nor asked one of his doomed girlfriends any rhetorical questions starting with, “You know what I love about this country. . . ?”

We know Jack loves his country, because he fights for it, and kills the guys who want to hurt his family and countrymen, even if those guys come dressed as bureaucrats or UN representatives.

Even liberals get that. And they know they need someone like that, even if they won't allow themselves to believe they can have it in the real world.

Don’t Southern Baptists Think That Mormons and the Devil Are Brothers?

Disclosure: I was an active member of a Southern Baptist church for several years, and was licensed to preach by my church when I was twenty, (a preparatory step until, usually, a young person finishes seminary and is ordained). I had almost all good experiences with the Southern Baptists; unfortunately the one bad experience I had really managed to count. My pastor also was a graduate of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Dallas, where Huckabee “attended,” only my pastor actually earned a degree.

I've noticed that in most any other churches or denominations, one finds examples of clergymen with a wide variety of personalities: studious, garrulous, hilarious, solemn, contemplative, extroverted, introverted, etc. But Baptist preachers tend to come in only one or two personalities. In fact, mostly only one. It’s a bit hard to capture this personality in words, so I’ll just say, if you watch and listen to Mike Huckabee, you're seeing it. I knew or listened to 50 preachers exactly like him. My own aspirations to become a Baptist minister (misguided as they otherwise may have been on other grounds), were squelched by well-meaning preachers and outgoing who recognized that no church would ever have me because I didn’t have that personality.

Okay, so maybe I’m knocking the personality, which is easy for me because I haven't got any. And I recognize how that Baptist personality helped the SBC grow to be the biggest Protestant group in America, and stay that way all these years. And, most of the non-Baptist commentators who say they see something in Huckabee are reacting to that very same personality. If you’ve never run across it before it can be very winsome.

The thing is, I have run across it before, and it scares hell out of me that this guy might someday become President.

The thing is, you can't expect any future profiles or magazine covers to uncover The Real Mike Huckabee, or to peel back the "layers" of Mike Huckabee, even if they promise to do so. There is no other, realer, Huckabee. There are no other layers to Mike Huckabee to peel. This is it. And all there ever will be.

But just because the universal Baptist preacher personality is rather shallow, doesn’t mean it's dishonest. Huckabee adds that element all on his own.

So far, he’s lied repeatedly in public debates and interviews that he has a “theology degree,” and has provided false biographical information that he has a masters from Southwestern. http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=59222
http://www.infoplease.com/biography/var/mikehuckabee.html

A profile in the Christian Science Monitor said “If elected, Huckabee would be only the second preacher president, after James Garfield. He senses that could be an obstacle. ‘Anytime you have been a person who was identified as a pastor and you've got a seminary education and theology degree, people tend to worry about you,’ Huckabee told the Values Voter Summit in Washington last month.”

Jim Geraghty at NRO called him out on his degree fib, and Huckabee’s research director e-mailed him back frankly admitting that “Governor Huckabee doesn’t have a theology degree. He only spent a year in seminary.”

It isn't pastors with seminary educations and "theology degrees [sic]" that tend to make me worry, Governor. I worry when they lie to me.

Then there’s Huckabee’s completely dishonest responses to questions about Romney’s qualifications as a Christian: is he one? This question was asked by CBS News:

CBSNews.com: “Do you believe that Mormonism is a legitimate form of Christianity?”

[Huckabee’s answer is no, he doesn’t think Mormons are Christians, but this is how he phrased it]:

Gov. Huckabee: “You know, Mormonism is a faith that people adhere to. And I think people ought to respect anybody’s faith. I am not all that familiar with the intricate details. I have enough trouble keeping up with my own faith. So, I do not spend lots of time trying to evaluate somebody else’s.”

CBSNews.com: “But do you think they’re real Christians?”

Gov. Huckabee: “Once again, I am not going to try to judge. That is for them to determine whether they accept Jesus Christ as the only revelation of God on Earth. And, if they do, then that is how a person is a Christian, not by the label they wear, but by the position they take on the role and the personhood of Christ.”

I am only speaking from my own experience when I say that no born-again Christian kid, who preached his first sermon as a teenager, (like me), went to a Baptist college to major in the Bible, spent a year in seminary, pastored two churches and ran the Arkansas Baptist State Convention, has finally reached the ripe old age of 52 without having a very firmly established opinion about the doctrinal illegitimacy (from a Baptist point of view) of one of the largest religious bodies in the country. Huckabee also has, I can assure you, very specific opinions (even if he doesn't have so much in the way of facts) about Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, liberal Methodists, and Congregationalists (each and every one of us “lost as a goose in a snowstorm”). Yet he says he doesn't have an opinion about the Mormons? You may as well find a radical professor who’s spent his life studying Marxism who says he’s never thought about what capitalism is or whether it's been good for humanity.

Now, I don’t object to Huckabee holding this opinion about the LDS church. I’m a Catholic, and we don’t consider the LDS orthodox, either (not that Huckabee gives a damn what a heretic idolater like me thinks about anything). And I don’t believe that comments and opinions that might be appropriate in the pulpit or at your own church ought to be shared when you’re a presidential candidate making statements in the national press. It doesn't bother me even one tiny bit if Huckabee, the preacher, tells his congregation, “Now, we Baptists don’t believe Mormons are real Christians because….”

It’s not the opinion that galls me. I repeat: It’s the lying.

So how could he handle answering reporters' loaded questions, without lying?

He could try being a gentleman, even a Christian gentleman: When asked, he can reply, “Each of my fellow candidates identifies himself publicly with the Savior, Jesus Christ, which is the Biblical qualification for calling oneself "Christian." So who am I to judge them? I take them at their word. And if you want more than that, you can ask them--or you can ask Jesus.”)

But Huckabee, even as a candidate, is still an evangelical Southern Baptist preacher, which means he’s nothing if not smugly self-assured that he owns God’s truth just as surely and as unreflectively as he owns his Social Security number. (Unfair? I can name four other smugly self-assured Southern Baptists for you: Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Bill Moyers). Besides, Huckabee loves these questions, because they allow him to send messages to his evangelical base: I am the Christian leader here.

Not that there's anything Christ-like about the way, when Huckabee "apologizes," he has to twist the knife some more while pretending (publicly) to be pulling it out.

Like after that Mormons believe Jesus is brother to the Devil crack, (which I believe was done on purpose), Huckabee told reporters

“After the debate today, I went to Mitt Romney and apologized to him because I said I would never try -- ever -- to try and somehow pick out some point of your faith and make it an issue,” Huckabee told reporters, describing Romney as "gracious" in responding to the apology.

Let me rephrase this Huckabeespeak apology in straight English . “Governor Romney, I wouldn’t dream of picking out and making an issue of any of your people’s stupid doctrines, like, for instance, this one I've heard about lately that My Beautiful Saviour and Old Scratch are brothers.”

Romney automatically qualified as “gracious” when he didn't flatten this punk for that "apology."

Then there were Huckabee’s phony comments on Cuba. Again, it’s not so much how his policies are foolish and poorly thought out. It’s the way he lies about them.

Although the candidates kept it polite on stage, Fred Thompson's campaign circulated press clippings from 2002 in which Huckabee called for an end to the trade embargo with Cuba. In a letter to President Bush, Huckabee wrote at the time: ``U.S. policy on Cuba has not accomplished its stated goal of toppling the Castro regime and instead has provided Castro with a convenient excuse for his own failed system of government.''

That stance is bound to rile many Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade, who believe that the embargo helps undermine Fidel Castro's repressive regime.

Huckabee is certain to face questions about the embargo at a Monday morning press conference in Miami, where he is expecting an endorsement from Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, one of the most prominent Cuban-American Republicans in the state.

Caught off guard, Huckabee's campaign said two hours after the debate that he had since changed his position on the embargo after consulting with Cuban-American leaders.

“'He's committed to vetoing any legislation that lifts sanctions on Cuba,” said Huckabee spokeswoman Alice Stewart.

This doesn’t even qualify as a flip-flop, which requires at least one complete news cycle. Two hours later? So how does he explain this later?

“I really wasn’t that aware of a lot of the issues that exist between Cuba and the US. Being in Arkansas it’s not something that there’s a close proximity of.”

That’s right, Republicans. He denies that before last month he even knew we weren’t getting along with Cuba.

We’ve had a trade embargo against Cuba since 1960--the Eisenhower administration. Yes, Huck was only 5, but since then we’ve had the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis, and four decades of expeditions by Leftist students and their professors to help the People’s Republic get their cane crop in. I was little in 1960, too, and Michigan is even farther from Cuba than Arkansas is, but I’ve heard of our troubles with Cuba.

Besides, there was that letter Huckabee wrote in 2002 telling the President that the embargo against Cuba wasn’t accomplishing “its stated goal of toppling the Castro regime.” Which kind of implies, you know, awareness.

And Cuba not in close proximity to Arkansas? Imagine President Huckabee, limited to imagining threats only from “something that there’s a close proximity of”--meaning it’s at least closer than Cuba. Inner-city Baltimore, maybe.

Then my favorite was this exchange on Fox News Sunday, which got by everybody, apparently, except yours truly, and my longsuffering wife who's had me repeating it to her all week.

Chris Wallace asked Huckabee to comment on the destroyed CIA interrogation videotapes, and, apparently drawing a blank similar to the one he had over last week’s NIE report, Huckabee decided he’d answer a different question about torture instead.

WALLACE: …What do you make of the CIA destroying the tapes of those two investigations — or those two interrogation interrogations? And as president, what would you do about it?

HUCKABEE: Well, it goes back to this whole issue whether or not we should have torture. You're about to have a guest on this program for whom I hold in high esteem, and that's Senator John McCain.

I think it's absurd, and I've said this many times, for anybody running for president to think they know more about torture than John McCain.

I don’t know if it would be absurd for anyone to say that, I just don’t see how it answers the question, nor how it has to do either with the issue of the videotapes, or any issues of torture. Suppose Wallace asked if we should increase funding for prostate cancer, would Huckabee start blustering: “I think it's absurd, and I've said this many times, for anybody running for president to think they know more about prostate cancer than Rudy Giuliani.”

And? So?

But Huckabee wasn’t finished, deciding he'd take a stab at the videotape issue after all. But first he had more to say about torture.

One of the reasons that I came out this week — and I had said so earlier, but nobody was paying attention. Now people are paying attention to what I'm saying. But I don't believe that we ought to torture. I think it's a policy that is beneath us. It is obviously unproductive.

And every single military person with whom I've spoken, people who actually have been trained and who have been on either side of this issue, either being tortured or being asked to do it — I've got to tell you, I can't find anybody who says that ought to be the policy of the United States.

So when we start destroying documents, what are we destroying them for? Are we doing it for security purposes or to cover somebody's rear end?

If we're covering somebody's rear end, we need to expose their rear end and kick their rear end for doing something that's against the best interest of the United States and the responsibility and the respectability of this country.

Did you get that?

Huckabee says he's had many conversations with military persons asking them if torture should be the policy of the United States. Then I'll bet he asks them after that if they think we should have a policy of shooting unarmed prisoners. If he really asked them this and didn’t just make the whole thing up, (I do think he makes this stuff up), did he really think that military commanders were going to say, “Yes, governor, our policy should be torture.”

This is exactly what I mean when I say Huckabee has a one-layer personality. Don’t look beneath what he says, because he never does.

But even more outrageous (I was amazed that Matthews let it go by), was his statement that he has discussed torture with American military people “on either side of this issue…[those military persons] either being tortured or being asked to do it.”

Being asked to do it? Is he saying he’s talked to military people who are being asked to torture? By whom? By General Petraeus? By Bob Gates? This would qualify as a really, really big news story if anybody actually believed this guy. (And yet he is being taken so seriously! It's that personality, my friend. It makes you want to trust him).

Soldiers asked by superiors to torture. Can you imagine if Huckabee made a stupid comment like this as President, with a Democratic majority in Congress? Conyers and Levin would have to be cryogenically preserved just so they could be brought back later to wind up the last of their investigations in 2099. (Leahy’s already been cryogenically preserved twice and brought back, which is why he acts that way and always believes we're still in the middle of the Watergate hearings).

My point: not only is Huckabee a big liar, but a big, bad liar. Those who like Huckabee call him a “great candidate” and “very smart.”

Does this sound smart to you? Does voting for him sound smart to you?