Tête-à-Tête-Tête

I knew I was forgetting something, when I wrote my not-so-nice piece about Mike Huckabee last weekend. So, I’m going to wrap it up here. Besides the one thing I forgot, there is also a side note that I just picked up on while on the way home from work Friday night. I’ll put them together here and then drop Mike Huckabee off my radar, lest I begin to appear obsessed with him (though not compared to Neal Boortz’ obsession with Hillary Clinton) … (!).

First is the part I missed before, which is Huckabee’s complete & total unpreparedness in the area of foreign policy, summarized here:

A senior aide to Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee admitted Friday that the former Arkansas governor had “no foreign policy credentials” after his comments reacting to the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto raised questions.
[...]
Huckabee’s foreign policy credentials have been under a microscope since the candidate admitted that he was unaware of an intelligence report that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program earlier this month.

Ok - there’s that… he was running for President and was less aware than I was at the time of the major headlines pulled by the NIE estimate which came out a little while back suggesting Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program. It’s one thing to downplay the signifcance of that report - an entirely different thing to be completely aware of it. More here.

So, that’s that… I don’t have to say much, I think the item speaks for itself & would not be a big selling point among any of us - least of all those who like “liberating” people overseas a lot.

And then there is this. I heard it on NPR on the way home from work, as I mentioned, Friday. It isn’t an argument about Huckabee, but it was startling enough to include just because of what it says about Americans and our religious proclivities. Some snippets from the story, but not in the order they were told:

“You could imagine that … this is his secret code way that he could speak to evangelicals without alienating more secular people,” Prothero says. “But the faulty part of that strategy is the evangelicals don’t even necessarily know these stories.”

[...]

“Sometimes,” the former Arkansas governor told his supporters, “one small smooth stone is even more effective than a whole lot of armor.”

“Maybe something to do with the war,” guessed Dan Booth, who was visiting from Alabama.

“He’s talking about peace, the resolution of peace?” ventured his friend Mike Allen.

[...]

“We’ve also seen that the widow’s mite has more effectiveness than all the gold in the world.”

We asked Daria Teutonico and Richard Pettit about the widow’s mite as they walked to lunch on Pennsylvania Avenue.

“I have no clue,” was Teutonico’s answer. “I thought a mite was a bug.”

“Is it a spider?” Pettit added. They both laughed.

Story here…

I was in shock. I honestly thought everyone was like me - everyone would have picked up on Huckabee’s comments about the smooth stone & the widow’s mite… I noticed, at least in the audio clip I had heard earlier in the week, that these two references were played virtually end-to-end. I hadn’t been able to help but wonder if all of Mike’s speeches were peppered with Biblical references so thoroughly. And, I had assumed that most of the “base” would understand it completely - not as some kind of “code”, which would require subtlety. As message. Maybe I was wrong. I teach a Bible class at church - I’ve mentioned it here before… And I always try to keep the material on an adult level. Do I need to back it up a notch or two? I’ve had to before, but mainly because I assumed too much about how well the Jewish couple in the class were familiar with the New Testament. Now I wonder if I don’t need to start all over, from scratch…