Huckabee

Dear God, please don't let Huckabee become president. (For the record that is a prayer not a case of taking His name in vain.)

This man scares me. I don't like Bush but Bush never scared me. Huckabee scares me. I'm not going to lie and say "if he gets elected I'll leave the country" because I wouldn't. I'd be a bit paranoid for 4 or 8 years, but I wouldn't leave the country, he may be crazy but there's only so much he can do without congress behind him, and congress is too slow to let him cause too much damage.

He's pro-war, pro-death penalty, pro-guns, generally pro-death all around. Except for abortion of course. Killing is only okay after they're capable of conscious thought. Also no stem-cell research, because the elderly aren't really doing anything for us anyway.

He's also opposed to killing gay people just for being gay. So I guess that's good. Now, none of the candidates (Republican or Democrat [except for Kucinich but he's a loon]) support gay marriage, so that's kind of a wash, but he also opposes civil unions, gays in the military, gay adoption, and thinks gay marriage, if not directly responsible for, is directly correlated with the downfall of civilizations.

He does have an environmental streak, wanting to leave the Earth cleaner than we found it, but not much of a record on it one way or the other. On other science fronts, he's been known to think AIDS patients should be quarantined and recently claimed ignorance of the issue when he made that statement without actually apologizing or contradicting it. He also doesn't believe in evolution which probably isn't terribly important for a president unless he starts meddling in education policy.

Now for the part that really scares me. Tax policy. He wants to abolish the IRS and the income tax and put in a Fair Tax (aka. consumption tax, national sales tax, really F'ing bad idea...) I tried to argue in favor of it once for a political science class. The general consensus is that, while it's a great way to start a tax system, replacing the current system would cause widespread recession and hurt the lower class the most.

Anyway I'd say he has maybe a 10% chance of winning the nomination but even that's going to need a strong showing in Florida.