Strauss-Kahn -- alleged French would-be rapist
Two men ended their presidential candidacies last Saturday: Mike Huckabee did so voluntarily on his Fox Cable News show (he teased his withdrawal all week), while the French director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was removed from a flight to France on a charge that he attempted to rape a maid in a Manhattan hotel earlier.
Who is scarier - president-wise?
Huckabee was leading among Republicans in polls of potential opponents of President Barack Obama in 2012; many thought he had the best chance to defeat Obama. For his part, Strauss-Kahn was reckoned to be the candidate most likely to unseat French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Neither of these things will be happening now. And thank God!
Huckabee and Strauss-Kahn have at least one thing in common - they like to live high off the hog. Strauss-Kahn's alleged assault took place in his $3,000/day suite at the Sofitel Hotel in Manhattan; in a strange interlude on Huckabee's show, Donald Trump appeared to say that it was good Huckabee wasn't running so that he could make loads of money and build himself a mansion in Florida.
In other ways, they differ substantially. Strauss-Kahn was a former professor and was a man-of-the-world, i.e., he believes in economics, physics, biology, et al. - although, unfortunately, he's also a potential sexual predator.
Huckabee is a Baptist minister who went to a bible college and doesn't believe in all those science things -- Huckabee is a creationist who says the earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago.
According to Wikipedia, Huckabee
graduated magna cum laude from Ouachita Baptist University, completing his bachelor's degree in Religion in 2½ years before attending Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. He dropped out of the seminary after one year in order to take a job in Christian broadcasting.
Nothing wrong with being a fundamentalist Baptist minister whose entire education focused on Christian doctrine -- nothing at all. But you're running for President of the United States -- in the 21st Century? You have to go back to William Jennings Bryan at the turn of the last century to find someone that benighted.
We're now competing with China and India for economic supremacy of the globe. Remember this story?
Fifteen-year-olds in the U.S. ranked 25th among peers from 34 countries on a math test and scored in the middle in science and reading, while China's Shanghai topped the charts, raising concern that the U.S. isn't prepared to succeed in the global economy.
Of course, the report was prepared in France! Is it possible that even the French are now more rational and scientific minded than we are?
Can you imagine having our nation's leader saying this at an international meeting -- "Well, I don't see how you can claim these oil deposits were formed millions and billions of years ago -- when the earth is only 6,000 years old!"
Of course, the scariest thing is that a significant proportion of Americans believe this -- and surely some President soon, whether Huckabee or some other noodnik, will be such a spokesperson from the dark ages.
