american spectator

(related: arkancide, )

This afternoons Rush Limbaugh Show, hosted by Mark Belling, featured a semi-restrained rant by the host against Mike Huckabee. I listened to one segment of the show, as time allowed. According to Belling, other than the two issues of gay marriage and abortion, reading the words of Mike Huckabee is virtually indistinguishable from reading the words of John Edwards.

Belling needed only to include Mikes pro-Second Amendment stance, and he would have scored the Howard Dean Trifecta:

I dont mean to sound like Im picking on Belling. Rudy Guiliani said much the same thing with his statement on social issues a few months back:

Jeffery Lord in the tried a similar tack in a blistering piece today, assailing Huckabee for attacking Reaganomics.

Lord makes no specific references to Huckabees policy positions, but instead relies on statements by The Club for Growth as the arbiter of true conservatism. Any serious observer of the Republican Primary season understands that the The Club for Growth has been anything but an honest broker with regards to Huckabee specifically, and generally, any Republican who fails to american spectator the small-tent definition of conservatism they espouse.

Do Mr. Lord, Mr. Belling, and others actually believe that the Club for Growth represents the 50 percent of Americans who own a small piece of Wall Street in their 401(k)s?

Please.

The Club for Growth represents The Club for Growth. Their crusade for ideological purity is largely responsible for the loss of the Senate in 2006. If the Club for Growth is such a serious and respected group policy wonks, as Lord suggests, then why havent they successfully answered the leftist mantra of Tax Cuts for the Rich? Answer that and you take the whole Greed issue off the table.

There is only one reason that the left trots out that line: It works.

If the smartest guys in the room at The Club for Growth cant answer that, american spectator maybe theyre not so smart after all. And, maybe their personal crusade against Mike Huckabee has cost them in credibility in ways that they cannot yet fathom. And maybe, american spectator maybe the middle class, gun-toting, Bible believing, wife-loving, foot soldiers of the Reagan coalition just dont believe the Club for Growth anymore, and couldnt care less about what the American Spectator says, and are just as likely to tell NRO and WSJ to go jump in the lake as not.

Try this experiment: Go back just a couple of years and find any Mitt Romney speech concerning the social issues, right to life, defense of marriage, and the right to keep and bear arms. Any of them, it doesnt matter. Now, close you eyes as you listen and you just might think youre listening to &.. John Kerry.

Get it?