CNN describes a revealing campaign moment, in which Mike Huckbee chose to deflect press criticism of his own tardy awareness of a breaking story by echoing democrat-style criticism of Bush Administration foreign policy.

Huckabee’s comments came in an interview with Iowa’s Quad City Times, in which a reporter asked him why, last month, he was at first unaware of a National Intelligence Estimate detailing the threat posed by Iran, despite the fact the report had been made public for several hours.

“That was released at 10 o’clock in the morning,” Huckabee said. “At 5:30 in the afternoon, somebody says, ‘Have you read the report?’ Maybe I should’ve said, ‘Have you read the report?’ President Bush didn’t read it for four years; I don’t know why I should read it in four hours.”

Romney said Tuesday the comments were in ‘bad taste,” and lifted from the “Democratic playbook.”

Roger de Hauteville takes a vicious poke at the adolescent immaturity of libertarians like Ron Paul (and some other people I know). FitzJames Stephen would be proud.

Let me save you all some time.

Look, I know it’s amusing talking about Ron Paul! Ron Paul! is a blast. Everybody loves a verbal grenade rolled into excruciatingly dull settings. But politics is supposed to be dull. Politics was interesting in Russia in 1917, in Iran in 1979, in Venezuela last year… well, what I’m trying to tell you is you don’t want to “live in interesting times.”

Now, young persons and people in rent-controlled apartments that work at fair trade coffee shops can afford the luxury of talking about whether the American Civil War was a good idea. If you just got out of college, Ron Paul! is right up your alley. Why talk about today’s silly problems when Ron Paul! is arguing about whether we should abolish the Second Bank of The US? It’s so much more lively to talk about history, because it’s on the shelf and you can find any damn version of it you want to argue over. Real time isn’t indexed yet.

Ron Paul! is captivating to youngins because he’s like the reset button on Halo. You don’t have to live with your decisions in the context of your surroundings. If you charge into a nest of fiat currency economies or Brutes, Elites, and Grunts and get slaughtered, just start over! Instead of having to offer cogent and useful advice on how to move forward in contemporary life, you just mention that contemporary life shouldn’t be that way.

Read the whole rant.

17:01 video

Many YouTube commenters were strongly moved by Thomson’s Reaganesque speech, and so was National Review’s Peter Robinson:

While the other contenders are frantically saturating the Iowa airwaves with 30- and 60-second attack ads—Romney is guiltiest, if only because he’s richest—Thompson has sat himself down, looked into a camera, and spoken for a quarter of an hour, calmly and straightforwardly making his case. I myself find this impressive—in a way, moving. Thompson seems to have stepped out of the eighteenth century. He trusts voters to think. And if the comments on YouTube are at all representative, plenty of people agree. …

While we await Mr. York’s next dispatch, take a look at the Thompson video. Politics as, from time to time at least, they really ought to be.

If Fred Thompson keeps speaking like this, I think he has a good chance of winning the GOP nomination.

2:16 video

A response to I’ve Got a Crush on Obama and its successors.

Hat tip to Logan Murphy.

1:14 video

William Murchison has identified the candidate Republicans should be supporting in ’08, and always.

I’ve just now figured it out — the right conservative candidate for these confused and disturbing times. I’m voting for Barry Goldwater, and nothing can stop me. Save — I admit — the inconvenience of Barry’s residence in a venue other than the land of the living.

Still, I want to suggest to perplexed conservatives sorting through the credentials of Romney-Huckabee-Giuliani-Thompson-Paul-McCain that no one matches in substance and appeal the man who, in our hearts, we knew to be right: Barry himself. I want to suggest this not by way of whomping up some sentimental pilgrimage back to ye olden tyme. I suggest Barry as a model for the principled conservatism so many seem to seek vainly and despondently. Those Republicans, for instance, who can’t figure out what the Republican message is or should be.

“The Republican Party,” asserts Rich Lowry of National Review, “has run out of intellectual steam and good ideas.” That’s a preposterous state of affairs. Good ideas, as opposed to useful legislative enactments, never decline in potency.

Our guy Barry knew as much. Our guy — whom Lyndon Johnson imagined he had disposed of in ’64, only to find Barry’s ideas taking up more and more space in politics — knew clearly enough what he was about. Freedom was what he was about — “the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.”

Read the whole thing.

Hillary’s campaign team has embarked in Iowa on a campaign to humanize Hillary, the Washington Post reports.

Hmmm, maybe changing the lightbulbs in that Brutalist church doesn’t sound so tough after all.

Conservative Republican Congressman Steven King, who represents Iowa’s Fifth District, and who had been expected to endorse Mitt Romney, shook things up by endorsing Fred Thompson.

The Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza reports.

Meanwhile poor Hillary is trying to turn the situation in Iowa around, before it is too late.

Michelle Malkin was being a trifle cruel:

Ah, the whiff of desperation in morning. Can you smell it? It’s Hillary Clinton’s new perfume. She’s on a whirlwind media tour this morning to rescue her crumbling campaign.

Nicholas Wapshott explains that other candidates made mistakes and the press helped him.

How did Mike Huckabee, a little known governor of Arkansas, find himself running neck and neck for the Republican nomination with Rudy Giuliani? How did the penniless Mr. Huckabee soar past the free spending Mitt Romney, estimated worth more than $200 million, in the early voting state of Iowa?

It is usually only paranoid conspiracy theorists who blame the press for causing the events they report, but in the case of the presidential race the insatiable need to find a new angle on an old story certainly helps the underdog. …

Quietly, while the big beasts of the Republican jungle were roaring and clawing at each other, the mild and modest Mr. Huckabee, like James Stewart as Jefferson Smith in Frank Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” was making steady progress. As a Southern Baptist, he had spotted what may turn out to be Mr. Romney’s fatal weakness: his Mormonism. By playing up his own role as a “Christian leader,” and invoking at every turn Jesus as his mentor, Mr. Huckabee silently slipped a stiletto into Mr. Romney’s ribs.

Although the Massachusetts governor’s appeal last week in College Station, Texas, for religious tolerance and more religion in public life showed that he could look and talk like a president, by addressing the issue of his faith he has only drawn attention to it, causing more voters to consider whether or not they really would be happy with a Mormon in the White House.

The most recent Iowa poll, for Newsweek, puts the Arkansas governor at 39%, ahead of Mr. Romney’s 17%. And in the latest national poll, for CNN, Mr. Huckabee is just two statistically insignificant points behind the leader, Mr. Giuliani.

Fortunately for the GOP, Iowa is far from decisive.

Eric Earling responds to David Horsey’s cartoon with a perceptive analysis of the tensions within the GOP.

David Horsey’s latest takes a stab at understanding the latest twist in the horserace of the Republican nominating contest. Horsey’s simplification of Rudy Giuliani as the candidate of national security conservatives, Mitt Romney for “business conservatives,” and Mike Huckabee for social conservatives doesn’t quite hold true in reality but it makes for a nice cartoon.

My hunch, however, is that observers with little more than indirect experience with social conservatives may be a bit miffed in full at how Huckabee can be rising in Iowa and in the South given his well-documented problems with economic/small government conservatives. For one, Huckabee’s rise isn’t merely a product of social conservatives, it’s specifically a product of Evangelicals (as the links in the section on Huckabee at this post describe). That’s an important point to understand even in the context of politics around here and the local GOP.

To understand what that means, take a step back from Mike Huckabee for a minute. Consider someone like him, without the baggage of a Presidential race: current Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson. Since taking that gig earlier this year, Gerson has spent a good deal of time talking about the issues of the day in a manner quite similar to Huckabee (Gerson spent a full column praising him). As Ross Douthat notes in his broader critique of Gerson, many of those columns have served to make Gerson’s fellow conservatives more than a bit angry at him. More importantly, Douthat identifies one of the serious deviations from the conservative mainstream by many Evangelicals like Gerson (and thus Huckabee):

As the world understood the term conservative in, say, 1965, Gerson isn’t one. Like many Americans who’ve crowded into the GOP over the last four decades–blue-collar Catholics and Jewish neoconservatives as well as evangelicals–the militantly libertarian spirit of the midcentury Right is largely foreign to him. But on the road from Goldwater to Reagan, and thence to George W. Bush, the conservative movement transformed itself from a narrow claque into a broad church, embracing anyone and everyone who called themselves an enemy of liberalism, whether they were New York intellectuals or Orange County housewives. This “here comes everybody” quality has been the American Right’s great strength over the past three decades, and a Republican Party that aspires to govern America can ill afford to read the Gersons of the world–social conservatives with moderate-to-liberal sympathies on economics–out of its coalition.

Not only do many Evangelicals not truly embrace the more libertarian aspects of conservative thought, they outright disagree.

Read the whole thing.

Carey Roberts describes a moment in which the veil slips:

Usually Hillary Clinton keeps her dagger stare under wraps. But the past Monday CBS News anchor Katie Couric talked to Hillary Clinton about the tightening race for the Democratic nomination.

Straining to keep her anger under control, Clinton complained, “I have absorbed a lot of attacks for several months now,” and vowed to counter her opponents’ criticisms.

Then Couric asked, “If it’s not you, how disappointed will you be?” That’s when the fixed smile disappeared. Hillary firmly replied, “Well, it will be me.”

But Couric persisted: “I know that you’re confident it’s going to be you, but there is a possibility it won’t be. And clearly you have considered that possibility.”

Mrs. Clinton gave a curt three-word reply: “No I haven’t.”

In that fleeting nanosecond, Hillary’s expression went from incredulous, to ice cold, to scary-condescending. You’ve got to see this to believe it.

0:20 video linked at the Huffington Post.

Dick Morris predicts that Hillary will respond to Obama’s Iowa challenge with the Clinton machine’s traditional no-holds-barred attack dog politics.

As her once-formidable lead in national polls dwindles and Barack Obama moves ahead of her in the all-important Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, Hillary Clinton will likely intensify her negative campaign against her rivals.

The Clintons’ political MO has always had a good dose of negative campaigning, especially when the going gets rough. There’s no reason to assume that they will alter their game plan now. …

Their favored method of getting out negative material about their foes is to hire private investigators to dig up dirt, which they then release through feeds to friendly journalists.

Consider the Lewinsky scandal. When Linda Tripp got to be a danger, the Clinton people released her Pentagon personnel file to Jane Mayer (then a reporter for The New Yorker). A federal judge later reprimanded two Clinton operatives for this violation, and the government had to pay Tripp more than $600,000 – but the damage was still done.

Meanwhile, Clinton staffer (and Hillary favorite) Sidney Blumenthal peddled the line that Monica was a stalker to journalist Christopher Hitchens. And White House operatives told ABC News’ Linda Douglas of incoming House Speaker Bob Livingstone’s infidelity scandal before it was made public.

In the ’92 presidential campaign, the Clintons openly disclosed their use of private detectives to dig up ammunition on women who had accused the presidential candidate of having affairs with them, disclosing that they paid detective Richard Palladino over $100,000 in campaign funds. But, of late, they avoid such embarrassing disclosures by hiding their detective bills in their legal expenses.

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Meanwhile, James Lewis, at American Thinker, suggests that Hillary is so downright nefarious that she planted the press rumors of a lesbian affair as a diabolically clever means of self-immunization.

So you’re Hillary Clinton, and your past can’t withstand examination. What do you do? Well, try a little Black PR operation.

Call it a pre-emptive self-inflicted smear. Because you know your shady past is bound to come up, and a lot of that stuff happens to be verifiable. (Who does Norman Hsu remind you of?)

So you need to discredit so-called “Swift Boating” — which actually means telling the truth about you.

You plant in the London Times a truly outrageous and false rumor about your relationship with Huma, your young and beautiful Saudi aide. Along with a picture of you two walking side by side. Then you discredit the Huma Ruma. That’s pretty easy, because it’s false.

Huma Abedin relationship rumor postings

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Hillary is clearly inspiring fear of just what she might be capable of in some quarters.