If At First ...

Noted that Richard "Sancty" Santorum has summoned the College of Cardinalshis advisers to Wash., D.C. next wk., following Willard "Rommy" Romney who's chatting up his quorum of apostles in Menlo Park (Calif., not the M.P. in Jersey) tonight. (The March of Time: There were no "Michelin-starred New American restaurants" in the M.P. fifty yrs. ago.)

Is there a point? Not really, just this question: Neither religious whack-job having won in 2012, why in hell would they get their bands back together? Unless they're going to berate their ex-staffs further for being such fucking losers. An event that could be quite lucrative on pay-per-view or live-streamed for a fee. I'd pay (Not a whole lot, mind you.) to see & hear it.

In Huck news:

Yes, Mitt Romney's tendency to toady to superrich donors and entrepreneurs — coming on the heels of George W. Bush's high-end tax cuts — certainly saddled the GOP with a plutocratic image problem. But what about its tendency to flatter culturally alienated middle-class Americans by dismissing evolutionary biology, by mocking professors and "experts" of all kinds, and by pandering to the prejudices of a certain kind of ill-informed, reactionary religious believer?

The fact is that the Republican Party has long since become a bizarre only-in-America hybrid of fat cats and rednecks.

Deep down Republicans know that while a Huckabee candidacy might help address the image problems associated with the first half of that equation, he'd make those wrapped up with the second half far worse.

Consider some of Huckabee's public statements in recent years:

• Praising the work of a hack historian lionized by Know Nothing evangelicals, Huckabee declared in 2011, "I almost wish that...all Americans would be forced, at gunpoint, to listen to every David Barton message." (Thank goodness for that "almost"!)
• Responding to the Sandy Hook school massacre of 2012, Huckabee suggested that schools had become "place[s] of carnage" because "we have systematically removed God from our schools."
• Last winter, Huckabee stated in a speech (not unscripted remarks) that "if the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it."
• Huckabee's latest book, slated to appear on Jan. 20, is titled God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy.

That, my friends, is what right-wing American populism sounds like in the second decade of the 21st century. It is the irritable mental gesture of a provincial (rural or exurban) white America that can't tell the difference between cultural signaling and a cogent argument. And it treats the details of public policy as an afterthought or a matter of indifference.

Oh no, how did we start on next yr.'s election already? Have to pay attention to the bigger picture. It's hard to stop 'though.