(Crossposted at my own blog.)

Mike Huckabee on torture, late November:

For the most part, Huckabee told reporters after speaking in Cedar Rapids on Thursday morning, U.S. policy ought to be to "never support anything done to others that we would not want done to our own soldiers."

...

Huckabee would leave decisions about the appropriateness of the technique "because of a unique situation" to commanders in the field.

Mike Huckabee on torture and Guantanamo, early December:

After the meeting, Huckabee joined Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in declaring his opposition to the interrogation procedure known as "waterboarding," and said he would support closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a contrast with the other leading Republicans.

Mike Huckabee on torture and Guantanamo, late December:

Asked about Guantanamo, Mike Huckabee said he had visited the facility and said it was “disappointing” that military personnel were eating meals that averaged $1.60 while the detainees were eating Halal meals that cost over $4 each.

“The inmates there were getting a whole lot better treatment than my prisoners in Arkansas. In fact, we left saying, ‘I hope our guys don’t see this. They’ll all want to be transferred to Guantanamo. If anything, it’s too nice.”

It looks like Huckabee decided that his earlier idea of picking a single issue to not be completely insane on was a bad move. No, he has to be crazy across the board.

(Crossposted at my own blog.)

Yesterday's TPMtv electoral roundup was definitely a keeper. Take a look.

I think Josh's assessment of the Republican race right now is spot on. You're already seeing the conservative punditry consolidate around Romney - a little over a week ago Joe Scarborough had a gushing interview with him on MSNBC, there's the National Review endorsement and just a general sense that things have reversed between Huckabee and Romney - Huckabee was largely perceived when he first started taking off as the anti-Romney, the guy who could win over the evangelicals because he was actually one of them rather than being a patrician panderer like Romney. Now Romney is largely seen among the GOP elite as the anti-Huckabee. Huckabee, for reasons I still don't fully understand, scares the crap out of them, and so they're rallying around the guy who can beat him - Giuliani's pro-choice, tarred as soft on immigration, scandal-ridden and too weak among evangelicals and the early-staters to rescue them from the genial fundamentalist menace.

So that makes Romney the eventual nominee, I suspect, since the conservative media's going to keep piling on Huckabee until he really starts to feel the pressure. Expectations for Huckabee are high right now, so Romney might not even have to get first in Iowa anymore - but if does, then he's going to be called the resurgent candidate and that boost is going to carry him through New Hampshire and the later states.

The other possibility is that Huckabee actually wins the nomination, and I think that's a possibility that's often too easily discounted. So far the anti-Huckabee sentiments among GOP pundits hasn't hurt his momentum so much, and while I suspect it will eventually, it might not be enough to stop the Huckabee steam engine. He could win, and in fact right now I think he has a better chance of winning the nomination than Giuliani. But I'm still going to have to hand it to Romney, with Huckabee as a close second.

On the Democratic side, I think Josh is underestimating the power of the anti-Clinton media firestorm. Sure her "inevitability" was always largely a media creation, as is her current campaign doldrums, but that doesn't mean that they're not real. Right now Iowa's anyone's game - hell, even Edwards could take it - but I think ultimately both Iowa and New Hampshire are going to go to Obama. What's going to happen then? I don't think we're going to see a line of TV personalities waiting to get on the air and, in perfectly even tones, say, "Well, in all fairness, Clinton's inevitability was always overrated and she's still looking pretty strong, so we could have a real fight on our hands still." No, the reaction's going to be more along the lines of, "HOLY CRAP, THE ONCE INEVITABLE CANDIDATE IS TAKING A BEATING COULD THIS BE THE BEGINNING OF THE END?!!"

Cue hours and hours of news footage about the Clinton campaign's total implosion and the inescapable tide of Obamalocity or whatever stupid word they're going to come up with for it.

Clinton might bounce back from it, and if Edwards takes Iowa we might see a whole different game. But right now my prediction for the general election battle is Obama versus Romney. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how that would turn out.

(Crossposted at my own blog.)

Nobody's ever really properly demonstrated to me the importance of Jonah Goldberg's opinion to the wider electorate, so I guess unless you're either a politics nerd like me and most of the people on my blogroll or a pretentious conservative self-styled pseudo-intellectual (which is really just one of the more detestable subgroups of your run-of-the-mill politics nerd), there's really no reason for you to care who this guy is. And that's why I haven't made much mention of him here.

Except that his forthcoming book, the unironically titled Liberal Fascism, is worth mention just for sheer entertainment value alone. If what we've seen from quotes and scans of advance copies floating around the blogosphere (look at the example in the title) are any indication, then writing this book and then allowing it to be published is somewhere on the spectrum of humiliation in between pissing your pants while receiving your high school diploma and being featured in an episode of To Catch a Predator.

There's an important lesson to be learned from all of this: the modern conservative movement is so impoverished of genuine intellect that one of their most prominent intellectual heavyweights is the guy who accused liberals of using fascism like a cudgel without even understanding what it means and then went on to write an entire book about how liberals are fascists because Hitler was a vegetarian who liked exercise too.

Ezra Klein likes to poke fun at Goldberg's oblivious insistence that his book is "a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care," but to be fair, Goldberg has a point. His book probably does represent the definitive laying out of that argument, but considering how obviously ridiculous and stupid said argument is, that's an extremely low bar to clear.