I’d love to get a transcript. I hope that Team Thompson was listening to Elmer GantryMike Huckabee’s Michigan concession speech in South Carolina, because the mendacity in it will be fodder for several campaign commercials this week. The man who wants a federal smoking ban wants government to leave us alone?

Please.

[Update]

Finger to the wind?

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has reversed his position on a federal ban aimed at workplace smoking and now believes the issue should be addressed by state and local governments.

The about-face is apparent in a Huckabee campaign statement, sent to The Hill Tuesday evening in response to questions about the smoking ban proposal. It clashes with the stance Huckabee has taken during his race for the White House and with his record as governor of Arkansas, when he signed into law a measure prohibiting smoking in most indoor public places.

Must be pre-emptive against the inevitable ads in SC. Maybe they should just be pictures of flip flops…

This would seem to be an indicator of the civil war that is brewing in the Democrat Party, and it’s not just the long-overdue (and delicious) class identity war between blacks and women. It’s about a lot of Democrats finally, at long last, getting fed up and frustrated with the Clintons.

First it was Ezra Levant in the Great White North (not a permalink–for readers from the future, go search the archives of early January, 2008), and now it’s Janet Albrechtsen, Down Under:

This is not simply a defence of Levant because he is a conservative columnist. Far from it. If a bleeding heart on the Left was dragged before a human rights commission for thinking and saying unpalatable things, even stupid things, the defence would remain the same. Defending the right to say the right things is easy. Defending the right to say the wrong things, even offensive things, is what counts if we are serious about free speech.

That’s why, some years ago, I wrote in defence of my colleague Phillip Adams when he was accused of racial vilification by an American who was offended by Adams’s assertion that the US was one of the most violent nations on earth and was largely to blame for the events of September 11. The comments were daft but Adams has a right to be wrong and so it was important to stand up for his right to say it.

Allowing a state body to investigate it as a speech crime sends a chill down the spine of Western progress. As Levant argued, “Freedom of expression is only meaningful when it trumps other values, such as political sensibilities, or religious dogma, or personal sensitivities. Indeed, Western civilisation’s progress in all realms, ranging from science to art, to religion, to feminism, to civil rights for racial minorities and gays, has come about from the free expression of ideas that necessarily offended some earlier order.” In short, self-criticism is at the core of the West’s progress. The battle of ideas may be no place for the faint-hearted, but it produces exceptional results by thrusting forward the better ideas.

Indeed.

We can tolerate intolerance (as long as the intolerance is peaceful), but the Islamist enemy seemingly cannot. That is one of the (many) irreconcilable differences that make this such a difficult war. And it’s a war that’s made all the more difficult because they use our own tolerance and freedom against us.

On the Ron Paul controversy, from Robert Bidinotto.

Harder. Thompson is finally going after McCain. I’ve been thinking that he was going to hold off on this until after the Michigan primary, but maybe he thinks that’s pretty much over now, so he’s finally softening him up for the election in South Carolina on Saturday.

And as he says, the notion that he’d go through all this just to be a stalking horse for McCain is indeed “ludicrous.”

Harder. Thompson is finally going after McCain. I’ve been thinking that he was going to hold off on this until after the Michigan primary, but maybe he thinks that’s pretty much over now, so he’s finally softening him up for the election in South Carolina on Saturday.

And as he says, the notion that he’d go through all this just to be a stalking horse for McCain is indeed “ludicrous.”

Harder. Thompson is finally going after McCain. I’ve been thinking that he was going to hold off on this until after the Michigan primary, but maybe he thinks that’s pretty much over now, so he’s finally softening him up for the election in South Carolina on Saturday.

And as he says, the notion that he’d go through all this just to be a stalking horse for McCain is indeed “ludicrous.”

Christopher Hitchens wonders why anyone would want to once again place the ongoing and corrupt soap opera that is the Clintons back at the center of our national politics.

What do you have to forget or overlook in order to desire that this dysfunctional clan once more occupies the White House and is again in a position to rent the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign donors and to employ the Oval Office as a massage parlor? You have to be able to forget, first, what happened to those who complained, or who told the truth, last time. It’s often said, by people trying to show how grown-up and unshocked they are, that all Clinton did to get himself impeached was lie about sex. That’s not really true. What he actually lied about, in the perjury that also got him disbarred, was the women. And what this involved was a steady campaign of defamation, backed up by private dicks (you should excuse the expression) and salaried government employees, against women who I believe were telling the truth. In my opinion, Gennifer Flowers was telling the truth; so was Monica Lewinsky, and so was Kathleen Willey, and so, lest we forget, was Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says she was raped by Bill Clinton. (For the full background on this, see the chapter “Is There a Rapist in the Oval Office?” in the paperback version of my book >No One Left To Lie To. This essay, I may modestly say, has never been challenged by anybody in the fabled Clinton “rapid response” team.) Yet one constantly reads that both Clintons, including the female who helped intensify the slanders against her mistreated sisters, are excellent on women’s “issues.”

Poor Bill. All those people always lying about him.

[Update a few minutes later]

Is Obama the new Bill Clinton?

In some of the most unfortunate ways, the Barack Obama phenomenon

I wish I’d thought of this. He tells Hillary that it took men to give women the vote.

Would this have happened in a Thompson administration?