With no Christian fundamentalists among the current pack of Republican presidential hopefuls, the candidates saw this weekend’s Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit as an opportunity to win the support of the highly-influential evangelical community. The candidates paraded down as home God-fearers, tossing the fresh meat of “pro-life,” “holy word of God,” and “family values” into the salivating crowd of lobbying Christian zealots. With the candidates constantly trying to out-hyperbolize each other, there was bound to be a cockeyed quote or two.
Rudy Giuliani, who took a 22-minute break from beating people to death with 9/11 exploitations on Saturday to try to convince evangelicals that he is not a baby-killing Satanist but rather a pure Christian soul whose, “belief in God and reliance on His guidance is at the core of who [he is],” was able to navigate around piles of feces without delivering any gaffs.Surprisingly, it was Mike Huckabee, the loveable underdog who goes on the Colbert Report a lot and seems like a pretty genuine guy, whose remarks have people questioning his credibility.
In a speech before the Family Research Council, Huckabee said, “Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our workforce. It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.”
Really, Mike? All the strawberry pickers outside San Diego are illegal immigrants not because strawberry picking is an impossibly difficult job that yields very little wages but because all the good American strawberry pickers were aborted? Natives to Mexico and Guatemala maintain suburban golf courses outside of Philadelphia not because they’ll cut fairways for under minimum wage but because all the hard working American grass-cutters were murdered before they even got the opportunity to sit atop a mower? I don’t know about that one. I’m going to be bold here and say that American businesses use imported workers for reasons other than abortion.
At least Huckabee has an excuse for when Giuliani slaughters him by roughly 78 percent in the New Hampshire primary. I can see his concession speech now: “It has been a great ride. We’ve met great people and my faith in America has been renewed. I congratulate Rudy. I think he’ll do a lot for hard-working American families. I’m not going to make excuses here, but it might be that millions of my voters were aborted within that past 35 years. Nothing I can do about that.”
I think people should use that rationale more often. If the NHL wanted to explain why no one goes to their games anymore, they could just say that the fetuses of millions of hockey-addicts were tossed in the metaphorical trashcan before they were even able to admire the beauty of Phoenix Coyote’s winger Fredrik Sjostrom. One day a drunken Britney Spears is going to waddle out of her front door naked with shards of glass in her hair and yell into a TMZ video camera, “I’d still be famous if all my fans wasn’t slaughtered before they was even borned yet!”
As the election nears (only two November’s away!) we can only hope that we’ll get to hear more outrageous claims such as this one. These candidates give speeches in front of extremists everyday. Getting a rise out of extremists is tough; you can’t depend on sound, tempered logic with these people. To get their support you have to sink to their level—that’s why Huckabee says the reason there are so many immigrants in the work force is abortion. Undoubtedly a candidate is going to go in front of an environmental lobby and say that saving the beluga whale is the most pressing issue in American history. At some point a candidate is going to go in front of a group of lumberjacks and say that the lumberjacks were the true heroes after 9/11. Smart people will say dumb things in front of dumb people, old crusty newsmen will analyze these speeches without a hint of sarcasm, and we will have a front row seat—Campaign ’08!