Huckabee's heroes

The more strongly Mike Huckabee comes on in the polls, the more the disturbing trends behind his rise come to light. For example, his low-budget surge in Iowa is being fueled by his popularity amongst the right-wing home-schooling set:

While early attention focused on Romney and other better-known and better-funded opponents, home-schoolers rallied to Huckabee's cause, attracted by his faith, his politics and his decision to appoint a home-school proponent to the Arkansas board of education.

If people want to home school their kids, that's fine by me. But home schoolers have absolutely no place in setting policies for public education. With more and more focus on setting educational standards, putting hard-core Christianists on the policy boards of schools that they won't let their kids go to because they teach evolution seems to me like a trojan horse destined to introduce all sorts of backwards ideas into public education. Don't believe me?

"Even though the media makes it seem that we are a homogenous group of Bible-thumpers and flat-Earthers, there is a variety of opinion," Roe said.

Sure, some of them thump, others bang, a few lightly tap, and a small handful are content to merely wave it around. More disturbing, though, is that flat-Earthers are included in the "variety of opinion" that characterizes home schoolers, along with those who believe that everything revolves around the Earth and some who think that the Earth is really just the shell of a giant turtle swimming in a vast ocean.

These are the people helping to propel Huckabee towards center-stage. And unlike Bush, whose Rovian tactics cynically manipulated these people into voting for the dolt before dropping them like a hot potato to pursue more plutocratic policies, Huckabee seems to be one of them. I take some solace in knowing that the flat-Earth crowd and their fellow travelers make up a minority of the electorate - albeit a well-organized minority, but I'm a little bit fearful about those who would fall for Huckabee's version of economic populism and his "nice guy" persona.