A Stitch in Haste

Mike Huckabee demonstrates once again that there is no rational basis for any radical social conservative not to support his presidential campaign:

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee rejects letting states decide whether to allow abortions, claiming the right to life is a moral issue not subject to multiple interpretations.

"It's the logic of the Civil War," Huckabee said Sunday, comparing abortion rights to slavery. "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."

That is actually a perfectly viable, logical position — that just happens to be dead wrong. If you believe that a clump of cells with no brain and no nervous system — and therefore no consciousness — can somehow be "an autonomous human being," then of course abortion is immoral and should not be "left to the states. There is nothing intrinsically superior about rights — including purported "fetal rights" — being violated at the state level rather than at the federal level.

Something to keep in mind the next time Huckabee spews any anti-gay bigotry — which he certainly will: "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." Indeed.

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It would have been nice if Huckabee — who was speaking in the context of countering Fred Thompson's position on abortion — had also pointed out that overturning Roe v. Wade would not "send it back to the states." As I and a handful of others have tried, repeatedly, to emphasize, overturning Roe would send abortion back to Congress, which the Supreme Court just recently permitted to ban one form of abortion. Thompson's "world without Roe" lie reflects either his own ignorance of basic legal principles, or his reliance on his audience's ignorance of basic legal principles.

Either way, Huckabee claims both the moral and the pragmatic high ground relative to Thompson.

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On a tangent, Huckabee — under attack for an embarrassing "please raise taxes" speech he once gave to the Arkansas legislature — has reportedly embraced the fraudulent spin of the "fair tax" movement's calls for replacing the federal income tax with a federal sales tax. To review:

--The proponents of the fair tax lie, flat out lie, about the tax being "23%." It's 30%, diluted via a deliberately wrong denominator: 0.3/1.3 = 0.23; but the tax is still a 30% tax. All else is willful deception.

--And the tax rate wouldn't even be 30%; it would be at least 53% and perhaps as high as 82% according to one nonpartisan study.

--Income tax today + sales tax tomorrow = both taxes the day after tomorrow. Who seriously doubts this?

The devil you know...