Lip Service -- Huntsman
Out of respect and concern for one of the weakest of my physical components -- my stomach -- I have bent my ears to only a few words of all those uttered in the many debates that have been held throughout this already far overlong election season that so far has perversely involved nothing but the various combinations of people vying to become the Republican candidate for President. But I have read through all the so-called "live blogs" of these debates that have been appearing on the progressive Daily Kos and on the Lord-knows-what A. Sullivan's slice of the Daily Beast, together with the copious mentions and analyses of those events that appear elsewhere all over the Internet. And through it all, the aspirant that has struck me as being always the most interesting among those different packs of often berserk coyotes howling at the Moon has been the ex-governor of Utah and former ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman.
Quite naturally he has also been the quietest of them and the one who has consistently been polled as being in last place, and he has never enjoyed even a moment as the sprinter in the lead. But now he has finally made a surge during the long awaited and just concluded New Hampshire primary, and he ended up third with 17%, not far behind R. Paul's 23% second place to M. Romney, the winner. Many believe, however, that winning this year is not Huntsman's dream and that instead he's prepping to be the man, the Repubs' man, in the next go-round four years from now.
It's hard to know what to make of J. Huntsman, mainly because of the company he keeps -- this group of Republican candidates. People think that R. Paul, often billed to be a Libertarian instead of a Republican, is the wild card in the bunch, but closer than usual looks at Paul make one suspect that he could be doing a good job of operating behind a smokescreen. Huntsman, on the other hand, like Paul, stays away from the obligatory trashing of B. Obama at every opportunity, and in other respects stays on the subjects and the stands of his own choosing, and they are characterized by the lack of the vitriol favored by the audiences and from which the other Republican candidates have been taking most of their cues, and Huntsman's only true conservative tendencies are supposedly his fiscal ones. But that's not all bad, and indeed it's generally a good thing to want to spend only as much as you already have, if that's included in what is today considered to be conservative thinking when it comes to the cold cash.
I kind of think that Huntsman is not the real thing -- not so much in the way that he thinks of and presents himself, but instead in whether and how the Republican party would present him in 2016 or in any other forseeable year as the candidate of their choosing. It seems to me that that party has already gone much too far down the uncivilized road and their carefully unspoken but always No.1 creed of "keeping the neeggaz down," to be able to make that kind of room for a man like him.
And even if he were -- by the same kind of miracle that propelled B. Obama into office -- to be chosen as President nevertheless, how could he still comfortably serve in that role, in light of the problems facing the country and the world, far ahead of the usual picayune issues? With his insulated and isolated Utah desert background and all those children that he has collaborated in producing, how would be able to address with any credibility the largely repressed but still overwhelming main problem of humanity, which is the presence of too many people crowded on the relatively small strips of habitable land that are surrounded by truly enormous amounts of poisoned water amd an atmosphere, practically speaking, that is barely more than skin deep. Overpopulation is at the root and the heart of all these other problems that threaten calamities all the way down the road -- among them the running out of resources of many kinds, the poisoning of the environment, the extinctions of species, and the turning of the earth into one big sweltering greenhouse from which there is no escape?
In the face of all that, paying lip service to any of the usual nonsense that anyone who would be a Republican candidate has to heed wouldn't work, and that's why it was not a good sign when, midway through the Iowa campaign, Huntsman suddenly turned tail on his previous contention that climate change is real, which brought him so much admiration among the thinking elements of the population, and he now says the equivalent of, "Let's hold up. All the evidence is not yet in." As if the opening of the Northwest Passage is just a fairy tale.
Quite naturally he has also been the quietest of them and the one who has consistently been polled as being in last place, and he has never enjoyed even a moment as the sprinter in the lead. But now he has finally made a surge during the long awaited and just concluded New Hampshire primary, and he ended up third with 17%, not far behind R. Paul's 23% second place to M. Romney, the winner. Many believe, however, that winning this year is not Huntsman's dream and that instead he's prepping to be the man, the Repubs' man, in the next go-round four years from now.
It's hard to know what to make of J. Huntsman, mainly because of the company he keeps -- this group of Republican candidates. People think that R. Paul, often billed to be a Libertarian instead of a Republican, is the wild card in the bunch, but closer than usual looks at Paul make one suspect that he could be doing a good job of operating behind a smokescreen. Huntsman, on the other hand, like Paul, stays away from the obligatory trashing of B. Obama at every opportunity, and in other respects stays on the subjects and the stands of his own choosing, and they are characterized by the lack of the vitriol favored by the audiences and from which the other Republican candidates have been taking most of their cues, and Huntsman's only true conservative tendencies are supposedly his fiscal ones. But that's not all bad, and indeed it's generally a good thing to want to spend only as much as you already have, if that's included in what is today considered to be conservative thinking when it comes to the cold cash.
I kind of think that Huntsman is not the real thing -- not so much in the way that he thinks of and presents himself, but instead in whether and how the Republican party would present him in 2016 or in any other forseeable year as the candidate of their choosing. It seems to me that that party has already gone much too far down the uncivilized road and their carefully unspoken but always No.1 creed of "keeping the neeggaz down," to be able to make that kind of room for a man like him.
And even if he were -- by the same kind of miracle that propelled B. Obama into office -- to be chosen as President nevertheless, how could he still comfortably serve in that role, in light of the problems facing the country and the world, far ahead of the usual picayune issues? With his insulated and isolated Utah desert background and all those children that he has collaborated in producing, how would be able to address with any credibility the largely repressed but still overwhelming main problem of humanity, which is the presence of too many people crowded on the relatively small strips of habitable land that are surrounded by truly enormous amounts of poisoned water amd an atmosphere, practically speaking, that is barely more than skin deep. Overpopulation is at the root and the heart of all these other problems that threaten calamities all the way down the road -- among them the running out of resources of many kinds, the poisoning of the environment, the extinctions of species, and the turning of the earth into one big sweltering greenhouse from which there is no escape?
In the face of all that, paying lip service to any of the usual nonsense that anyone who would be a Republican candidate has to heed wouldn't work, and that's why it was not a good sign when, midway through the Iowa campaign, Huntsman suddenly turned tail on his previous contention that climate change is real, which brought him so much admiration among the thinking elements of the population, and he now says the equivalent of, "Let's hold up. All the evidence is not yet in." As if the opening of the Northwest Passage is just a fairy tale.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 1:29 PM
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