The Real News Is That It's News

Aug 31st, 2011

I like Jon Huntsman and have said so for months. No, I am not a supporter. Yes, I have every intention of backing the current President for reelection. That's not the point. Huntsman has generally struck me as smart and principled. After he received a grand total of 69 votes in the recent GOP Iowa Straw Poll, I expected his campaign to wind down and likely be over in a matter of weeks. Then something happened.

Following a particularly pandering pronouncement from Gov. Rick Perry, Huntsman tweeted this:

"To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy."

Huntsman has suddenly recaptured everyone's attention. It is now news when a GOP politician running for the Presidency declares that he believes in science.

In an interview with ABC's This Week airing today, Huntsman tells host Jake Tapper:

"The minute that the Republican Party becomes the party - the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012. When we take a position that isn't willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science - Sciences has said about what is causing climate change and man's contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position.

The Republican Party has to remember that we're drawing from traditions that go back as far as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, President Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Bush. And we've got a lot of traditions to draw upon. But I can't remember a time in our history where we actually were willing to shun science and become a - a party that - that was antithetical to science. I'm not sure that's good for our future and it's not a winning formula."

No other event in the campaign has better illustrated just how tight the stranglehold Dominionists and Christianist supremacists now have on the GOP.

Rick Perry leads a prayer 

Andrew Sullivan wrote last week:

"This is what this party now is: a religious movement clothed in anti-government radicalism. 


It has nothing to do with the conservative temperament, conservative political thought or conservative ideas. It is hostile to most existing institutions, especially government, contemptuous of the courts, and seized of an ideology as rigid as any far-left liberalism, as utopian as any wide-eyed socialist, as fanatical as anything the left spawned in the 1960s.

And it has hijacked an entire political party; and recently held to ransom an entire country. I knew it would get worse before it gets better. But this bad?"

I fear it is going to get much worse still. For the modern GOP, I think there is a long way to go before it hits bottom. What's worse, they are hellbent on taking us all there with them.