Huntsman jokingly blamed his failed candidacy in part on his wife, Mary Kaye, who told him she'd leave him if he abandoned his principles.I nominate Mary Kaye for the position of Best Political Wife of 2012. She is also known for her campaigns against juvenile diabetes and tobacco use. (If you want to know why I can't stand Ron Paul and his supporters, read what Mary Kaye has to say here.)
“She said if you pandered, if you sign any of those damn pledges, I’ll leave you,” Huntsman recounted.
"So I had to say I believe in science — and people on stage look at you quizzically as though you're was an oddball," Huntsman said, explaining why he was "toast" in Iowa.This is true. Although the image of St. Ronnie plays a huge role in the party mythos, the GOP has been taken over by the very same extremists who attacked Reagan from the right during his time in office. The key name here is Richard Viguerie, who led the anti-Reagan charge in the 1980s and who whipped up much of the Tea Party rebellion in more recent times.
Asked by journalist Jeff Greenfield if he could win the nomination of the Republican Party in Utah today, Huntsman said he could not, saying later that Ronald Reagan would "likely not" be able to win the GOP nomination nationally in this political climate.
And what strange times these are!
I still have vivid recollections of 1976, when Gerry Ford had to quell a Reagan rebellion. At the time, pundits agreed that Reagan (who was rather graceless in defeat) could never attain the presidency; he was too extreme. Today, he would be too moderate.
Alas, Huntsman is now trying to walk back his commentary. (Also see here.) Bad move, Mr. Hunstman: You can't criticize the GOP for it's lack of boldness while displaying evidence of your own gelatinous vertebrae. The teabaggers deserve many labels, but "timid" isn't one of them.
Why don't you concentrate on starting that third party you've been talking about? Work behind the scenes. Your wife can run for office. Any office.
The hypocritical Democrat: That, of course, would be Barack Obama. He has offered harsh criticisms of Syria and Iran because...
...you know, this crap is so effing hypocritical I'm literally shaking with rage as I write...
...because those countries use high technology to quell the rights of citizens.
But authoritarian governments, particularly in Syria and Iran, have shown that their security services can also harness technology to help crack down on dissent — by conducting surveillance, blocking access to the Internet or tracking the movements of opposition figures.Surveillance? Tracking opponents? That's Obama's whole act.
See Glenn Greenwald's column here, which quotes from a Democracy Now interview with William Binney, formerly of the NSA:
JUAN GONZALEZ: And the differences in the [Bush and Obama] administrations?Greenwald adds:
WILLIAM BINNEY: Actually, I think the surveillance has increased. In fact, I would suggest that they’ve assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens.
AMY GOODMAN: How many?
WILLIAM BINNEY: Twenty trillion.
AMY GOODMAN: And you’re saying that this surveillance has increased? Not only the—
WILLIAM BINNEY: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —targeting of whistleblowers, like your colleagues, like people like Tom Drake, who are actually indicted under the Obama administration—
WILLIAM BINNEY: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: —more times—the number of people who have been indicted are more than all presidents combined in the past.
WILLIAM BINNEY: Right. And I think it’s to silence what’s going on. But the point is, the data that’s being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want . . . That, by the way, estimate only was involving phone calls and emails.
Note, too, how this weapon has been not just maintained, but — as Binney said — aggressively expanded under President Obama. Obama’s unprecedented war on whistleblowing has been, in large part, designed to shield from the American public any knowledge of just how invasive this Surveillance State has become. Two Obama-loyal Democratic Senators — Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado — have spent two full years warning that the Obama administration is “interpreting” its spying powers under the Patriot Act in ways so “twisted” and broad that it would shock the American public if it learned of what was being done, and have even been accusing the DOJ and Attorney General Holder of actively misleading the public in material ways about its spying powers...Greenwald's run-on sentence goes on for another mile or two, but I think you get the point.
Syria may have a despicable government, but its version of "high tech" hardly poses a threat to us. American high tech does.
Facebook, Google, Apple and the wireless carriers have partnered up with the CIA, the NSA and military intelligence. If you annoy Uncle in any way, the government's dataminers can rapidly find out everything about you. And I mean everything: Your phone number, address, purchases, passwords, credit history, friends, lovers, exact physical location (via GPS), that embarrassing usenet posting you wrote back in 1995, and even the nasty things your co-workers said about you in a phone call last October. Yes, that phone call was translated into text and is word-searchable and will remain stored forever on a hard drive in the new NSA facility in Utah.
Hell, they could probably tell you the PH value of your dog's urine when she piddled on the neighbor's mums two weeks ago.
We live in a state of perpetual cyber-nudity beneath the all-seeing eye of the NSA, because Americans have been too damned lazy to defend the right to privacy. Obama's disingenuous attack on Syria was intended to rationalize our own surveillance state.
I am a Dem at heart. I've reluctantly decided that a second Obama term would be preferable to a first Romney administration. (The Supreme Court is certainly something to consider.) Yet if Mary Kaye would run as the Third-Party-To-Be-Named-Later candidate, I would give her very serious consideration.
Yes, she probably favors policies I don't like. But she seems to have only one face. Can you say the same of Obama or Romney?
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