Huckabee

It is a fine piece of evidence against the validity of the Republicans as a national party that Mike Huckabee's eponymous show on Fox News Channel is likely a boon to his chances at a future GOP presidential nomination while simultaneously disqualifying him from ever being elected President.

Watching his show, as I -- sadly -- regularly do, provides a neat insight into just how neanderthal, jingoistic, and undiverse a large portion of the Republican Party is. It's mostly the Palin wing, but there are others, as Huckabee has a somewhat broader appeal, as he is not seen as being as divisive as Palin. It is really pro-America propaganda at its finest, from the nearly all-white crowds to the leading nature of the "questions from the audience" to the country stomp music at the show's closing. Huckabee uses every opportunity to seem like a post-partisan uniter while creating entire interviews out of hypotheticals that attempt to preemptively scratch away Obama's sheen. "The expectations are just so high, so-and-so, that I wonder, is Obama's presidency damned before it begins?" or "Now that the national security appointments are rolling out, we hear from the radical wing of the Democratic Party -- will Obama's first term just be an ongoing fight with the crazy left?" are pretty much standard fare for Huckabee.

And to say he's a demagogue is, well, putting it lightly. He'll take a piece on Bernie Madoff and, after essentially accusing him of being singlehandedly responsible for the 20% drop in the DJIA, "seamlessly" segue into why this is evidence that we need a Fair Tax. At which point the APPLAUSE sign undoubtedly lights up, and you hear some strong clapping, and then the cameraman manages to find the lone person in the audience (who's always Jane Average, a 45 year old white woman) who is smiling and nodding her head in agreement with Huckabee's idiocy.

His show is truly something to behold, if you watch closely enough.