Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee was one of many Republicans who sought the Presidency in 2008, and while not winning the nomination, he came across as a strong conservative with somewhat reasonable views, seen as in the mainstream of the party for that election year. He even came across as likeable and pleasant in personality.
However, once Huckabee gained a radio talk show and an hour on the weekend on Fox News Channel, he went berserk, the best term that can be applied to a man who moved to the “hard” right and has emerged as a delusional and whacky man in his statements, making him a lunatic to any reasonable, rational human being!
And now, Huckabee has declared that the Benghazi, Libya tragedy makes it likely that Barack Obama will be impeached, and be unable to finish his second term as President!
Think about just how loony that statement is! Could Obama be impeached by the Republican controlled House of Representatives? YES, for certain, similar to the 105th Congress under Speaker Newt Gingrich which impeached Bill Clinton on December 19, 1998!
But Clinton ended up, even with a Republican controlled Senate, having votes to remove him from office on two impeachment counts, with a 50-50 tie and a 55-45 vote to remove, making it 17 and 12 votes short of removal from office by a two thirds vote!
And now, the Senate is Democratic 55-45, and even if a Senate trial came in 2015 or 2016, with a possible Republican controlled Senate, there would still be no more than, say, 53-54 Republican Senators, and where would the GOP gain anywhere from 13 Senators then to 22 Senators this year or next to convict and remove Obama from the Presidency?
Huckabee is a true lunatic, therefore, and even if it were to happen, all it would do is give Vice President Joe Biden the Presidency, and an edge for the Presidential Election of 2016, which no one should think would lead to his likely defeat as a sitting President. So what would be gained by the GOP removing a term limited President?:
The answer is, simply, race hatred, pure and simple! There is NO justification to impeach and remove Obama, anymore than there was for Bill Clinton, and just as with Clinton, an impeachment would besmirch Obama in history, but he would still survive in office, and leave more popular as a result, just as with Clinton, who has become a “rock star” in his post Presidency!
Hello Professor,
Mike Huckabee has only accomplished the fact that he will pimp himself off to repeat the marketable reactionary conservative rhetoric. Like you have stated, it only makes him come off as every other delusional and whacky, lunatic.
Here is some food for thought:
This week marked the 37th time that the Republican Congress voted to repeal Obamacare. Of course it fails to move forward from here because the votes are not there in the Senate.
This posturing for solely political reasons reached a total cost to taxpayers is $55,000,000
Where is the outrage from the Tea Party and other Republicans for wasteful spending?
You are correct, Engineer of Knowledge, but I am also wondering how Juan would respond to this wasteful spending and ridiculous action of the GOP having 37 votes on an issue, none of which can ever be accomplished! So, Juan, how about it? We are waiting! 🙂
Well let’s see what we have in the gene pool here, shall we? Oh I see I am asked a question. So the Republicans have spent $55 million dollars on making it clear that they are against Obamacare and the big spenders, big government , progressive statist are somehow worried and outraged?? In other words Republicans have spent in the last couple of years by voting 37 times to repeal this monstrosity of Obamacare less than what the Federal government spends in 10 minutes and some of you think this is an outrage. That’s chump change! Its a non -existence cost when compared to what the Federal government spends. Its a pretty inexpensive way to make it clear to the American people, once Obamacare starts destroying their lives, as hundreds of thousands of believers have come to realize, who were the ones that were against it and who are the ones that are for it. Especially in the coming years 2013-2014 when all the disastrous consequences of Obamacare start doing their damage.
But I am not surprised that people with your mindset would be outraged about this, but not about the Obama administration willfully misleading the American people for political reasons about what caused and really happened in Benghazi for about 3 weeks, putting all the blame on a video. I am not surprised that you are not outraged that there is a poor fool in prison because he made that cheap video, a real political prisoner come to think of it. I am not surprised that you are not outraged that actually there was no security concern over the AP but that the government wanted AP to hold the story until they, the government announced it. In other words the government was pissed off because “AP’s story about the foiled plot was at odds with the calming message the White House had been conveying on the eve of the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.” ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/some-question-whether-ap-leak-on-al-qaeda-plot-put-us-at-risk/2013/05/15/47003ed4-bd77-11e2-89c9-3be8095fe767_story.html). I am not surprised that you are not outraged that IRS Deliberately Chose Not to Fess Up to Scandal Before Election : “The IRS commissioner “has known for at least a year that this was going on,” said Myers, “and that this had happened. And did he share any of that information with the White House? But even more importantly, Congress is going to ask him, why did you mislead us for an entire year? Members of Congress were saying conservatives are being targeted. What’s going on here? The IRS denied it. Then when — after these officials are briefed by the IG that this is going on, they don’t disclose it. In fact, the commissioner sent a letter to Congress in September on this subject and did not reveal this. Imagine if we — if you can — what would have happened if this fact came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hZqROJZTf3c#!
I am not surprise that you are not outraged that IRS asked pro-life group about ‘the content of their prayers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHSp50EzJxU&feature=player_embedded. I am not surprised that you are not outraged that IRS Official in Charge During Tea Party Targeting Now Runs Health Care Office or that the IRS is facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that it improperly accessed and stole the health records of some 10 million Americans, including medical records of all California state judges.That some 60 million medical records from 10 million patients were stolen by 15 IRS agents.That the personal health information seized on March 11, 2011, included psychological counseling, gynecological counseling, sexual/drug treatment and other medical treatment data. I’s sure none of this outrages you or any bonafide progressive. (http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/irs-face-lawsuit-over-theft-60-million-patient-health-records). What really matters to you is that the Republicans are big wasteful spenders because they spent over a period of a couple of years the equivalent of less than what the Federal government spends in 10 minutes! The outrage for you is that millions and millions of American actually detest Obamacare and that Republicans are just reminding Americans who are against this monstrosity and who are for it.
Juan, what I do not understand is that ObamaCare is the Newt Gingrich and the Heritage Foundation plan of 1993 as an ALTERNATIVE to HillaryCare, which was defeated in 1994. What Obama has brought about is a MILD plan, controlled by health care companies, not by Medicare. It was a conservative plan, until Obama backed off on Medicare for everyone and backed this less bold plan, and it is very close to RomneyCare, which, of course, Romney repudiated when he ran, which shows just how unprincipled and phony he was, as he should have gladly promoted what he did in Massachusetts, but could not, because of right wing whackos and libertarians! What hypocrisy!
Ron, maybe this will help you understand better the differences. No one better that Stuart Butler, the researcher behind the Heritage proposal back then. Since you claim to have an open mind, I hope you read this with that mindset.
( http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2012-02-03/health-individual-mandate-reform-heritage/52951140/1 )
“The confusion arises from the fact that 20 years ago, I held the view that as a technical matter, some form of requirement to purchase insurance was needed in a near-universal insurance market to avoid massive instability through “adverse selection” (insurers avoiding bad risks and healthy people declining coverage). At that time, President Clinton was proposing a universal health care plan, and Heritage and I devised a viable alternative.
My view was shared at the time by many conservative experts, including American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholars, as well as most non-conservative analysts. Even libertarian-conservative icon Milton Friedman, in a 1991 Wall Street Journal article, advocated replacing Medicare and Medicaid “with a requirement that every U.S. family unit have a major medical insurance policy.”
My idea was hardly new. Heritage did not invent the individual mandate.
But the version of the health insurance mandate Heritage and I supported in the 1990s had three critical features. First, it was not primarily intended to push people to obtain protection for their own good, but to protect others. Like auto damage liability insurance required in most states, our requirement focused on “catastrophic” costs — so hospitals and taxpayers would not have to foot the bill for the expensive illness or accident of someone who did not buy insurance.
Second, we sought to induce people to buy coverage primarily through the carrot of a generous health credit or voucher, financed in part by a fundamental reform of the tax treatment of health coverage, rather than by a stick.
And third, in the legislation we helped craft that ultimately became a preferred alternative to ClintonCare, the “mandate” was actually the loss of certain tax breaks for those not choosing to buy coverage, not a legal requirement.
So why the change in this position in the past 20 years?
First, health research and advances in economic analysis have convinced people like me that an insurance mandate isn’t needed to achieve stable, near-universal coverage. For example, the new field of behavioral economics taught me that default auto-enrollment in employer or nonemployer insurance plans can lead many people to buy coverage without a requirement.
Also, advances in “risk adjustment” tools are improving the stability of voluntary insurance. And Heritage-funded research on federal employees’ coverage — which has no mandate — caused me to conclude we had made a mistake in the 1990s. That’s why we believe that President Obama and others are dead wrong about the need for a mandate.
Additionally, the meaning of the individual mandate we are said to have “invented” has changed over time. Today it means the government makes people buy comprehensive benefits for their own good, rather than our original emphasis on protecting society from the heavy medical costs of free riders.
Moreover, I agree with my legal colleagues at Heritage that today’s version of a mandate exceeds the constitutional powers granted to the federal government. Forcing those Americans not in the insurance market to purchase comprehensive insurance for themselves goes beyond even the most expansive precedents of the courts.
And there’s another thing. Changing one’s mind about the best policy to pursue — but not one’s principles — is part of being a researcher at a major think tank such as Heritage or the Brookings Institution. Serious professional analysts actually take part in a continuous bipartisan and collegial discussion about major policy questions. We read each other’s research. We look at the facts. We talk through ideas with those who agree or disagree with us. And we change our policy views over time based on new facts, new research or good counterarguments.
Thanks to this good process, I’ve altered my views on many things. The individual mandate in health care is one of them.”
Stuart Butler, Ph.D., is a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org), where he is the director of the Center for Policy Innovation.
Oh one last thing on Obamacare, the Heritage or Gingrich plan did not create over 500 new federal agencies,hundreds of new taxes, put the IRS in charge with over 16000 new inspectors , add over $3 trillion (at least) in federal spending nor was it over 2000 pages long , 2000 pages that no legislator that voted for it ever read. So you see, except for maybe the mandate requirement, the differences are overwhelming.
Juan,
It was Einstein who is quoted, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
What you have just presented still does not negate the fact that repeating a vote to repeal the “Affordable Health Care†but has no future of moving forward to becoming law, costing the tax payer citizens of this country to the sum of $55,000,000 posturing solely for political reasons.
Should the 2016 election make a reversal in these political aspects, bring it up then. Anything else is just a waste of all citizens’ tax money. You have presented a lot of breathy, non-tangable, statements that do not counter this subject statement. This is a major pitfall in your writings per Logical Argumentation.
One of the first things for those who like to hike in the mountains is, “Don’t piss up hill….it will only run back down at you.†This is what the Republican Controlled House has not learned. Trust me; the majority in this country, those whom are critical thinking people, are taking note of this waste perpetuating from those who are claiming physical responsibly. They truly see it for what it is, “Insanity!”
Again, I am surprised that those who don’t give a damn about overspending $1.4 trillion per year, those who don’t give a damn about enslaving future generations with massive trillion dollars of debt, go absolutely nuts about less than 10 minutes worth of Federal government spending. It’s absurd! It’s like you overspending and wasting a thousand bucks and complaining because I “wasted” a penny! You can’t be serious. And you consider yourself a “critical” thinker? Good grief. The Republicans should remind the people every single chance they get that they want to repeal this monstrosity.
To combat Juan’s misinformation:
Here’s how the Affordable Care Act is helping people: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/healthcare/news/2013/03/25/57946/only-3-years-old-the-affordable-care-act-is-already-having-a-big-impact/
Great posts Engineer! 🙂
Thanks for your link above, Princess Leia!