Hitchens on Huckabee

No ambiguity here:

However, what Article VI does not do, and was never intended to do, is deny me the right to say, as loudly as I may choose, that I will on no account vote for a smirking hick like Mike Huckabee, who is an unusually stupid primate but who does not have the elementary intelligence to recognize the fact that this is what he is. My right to say and believe that is already guaranteed to me by the First Amendment. And the right of Huckabee to win the election and fill the White House with morons like himself is unaffected by my expression of an opinion.

In a breathtaking profile of Huckabee published in the Dec. 16 New York Times Magazine, we read under the byline of Zev Chafets the following euphemistic drivel:

Nowadays, Huckabee has more policy positions, but his campaign is really all about his Christian character. His slogan is "Faith, Family, Freedom," which Huckabee, who was once public-relations man for the Texas televangelist James Robison, wrote himself. Huckabee is no theocrat. He simply believes in the power of the Christian message, and in his ability to embody and deliver it. "It's not that we want to impose our religion on somebody," he wrote in Character Makes a Difference, a book first published in 1997 (as Character Is the Issue) and reissued earlier this year. "It's that we want to shape the culture and laws by using a worldview we believe has value."

Nice work, no? Can it really be true that "no theocrat" Huckabee wrote that whole slogan all by himself? While you ponder this massively impressive claim, I suggest that you look up the life and times of "the Texas televangelist James Robison" and ask yourself if, in voting against him or his smarmy underling, you would be acting or thinking unconstitutionally.

Awarding his subject a prize for performing the same cheap media trick that he has just performed himself, Chafets (who might also be described as a former public-relations man, but this time for Jerry Falwell's old friend and patron Menachem Begin) concludes by asserting that "Huckabee has become a master at disarming secular audiences." This big fat lie becomes a slender and wispy half-truth only if enough fools can be brought to believe it.