Monday, January 07, 2008

Huckabee

To add to the general disapproval: A few thoughts on Huckabee


The President has been criticized, or worse, for being a simpleton. Opponents of Huckabee have classified him in the same way. President Bush may have simplistic solutions at times, for example “stay the course”, but this does not mean that he thinks everything is simple. He clearly surrounded himself with advisers of different angles from the start of his presidency. Huckabee is a candidate who looks at everything from one direction. He was at a time obese. He lost the weight and wrote a book. Which could be summed up in the combination of: exercise more and eat less. Of course if someone wants to loss weight and follows this formula in the right proportions they loss weight. No need for diet pills and Adkins. It is simple: control yourself and get discipline. Just do dieting the “good” way. And here in lies the rub. Huckabee can only outline the “good” way. This is also his appeal. He plays the guitar and sings caring songs. He does not conclude that the problems faced can be solved with a simplistic formula but rather the message of "good". Huckabee shows in his leadership a lack of ability to execute justice. If the main function of government is "to punish the evil doers" I do not see him as a candidate who can govern, much less uphold the conservative ideals.


He can inspire. For he built himself from scratch into a Tele-Evangelist. But a candidate needs to do more than inspire the populous to speak with "God bless you" at the end of every sentence.

A New Means in a New Media

A Harvard grad discontented with the state of intellectual fermentation has come out with a new idea... a you-tube for intellectuals. Just opened today the site will attempt to give interviews with top thinkers and leaders. Organized into national topics these are arranged around bigger issues. And hence the incredibly brilliant title, www.bigthink.com. You would think that if the man was truly committed to extending the interplay of ideas he would have taken a bigger step beyond American consumerism than to simply add "think" to the given American "bigness". But, after walking for fifteen minutes and proposing "evasiveissues.com" as a suitable alternative I admitted to myself that I was simply listening to NPR while in an unstable state over the holidays. Laying the sorry British imitation aside, I readily accepted the site. This initial acceptance was further strengthened when recalling that I could remember the address and had visited it without a paper clipping. Well I briefly visited the site, it looked legitimate, and thought of posting the word in light of the recent deficit of posts.