Huck`s Hour of Power

During his speech to the Conservative
Political Action Conference, among the best he has
delivered, Mitt Romney suspended his campaign, so as not
to imperil GOP prospects in the fall. Said Mitt, "If
I fight on … all the way to the convention, I would
forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it
more likely that Sens. Clinton or Obama would win. And
in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be
a part of aiding a surrender to terror." [Video|Transcript]

Thus

did Romney endorse the John McCain view that the
Democrats who intend to pull all U.S. combat brigades
out by a date certain are raising the "white flag of
surrender" to Islamofascist terror.

But when Mike Huckabee, who also
delivered one of his best at CPAC, was asked if he would
stand down for the good of the party, as his winning the
nomination is now a near-mathematical impossibility, he
brusquely dismissed such demands as "total nonsense."

"I didn`t major in math,"
said the Baptist preacher,

"I majored in miracles." Good for Huck. Why
should he drop out?

For too long conservatives have
suppressed their convictions or meekly submitted, so as
not to oppose a Republican president or get out of step
with the party leadership.

Because they did not wish to undercut
George H.W. Bush, too many went along with his

tax hikes and

quota bill. And they paid the price in 1992.

Because they did not want to get out of
step with their

K Street contributors, too many went along with the
refusal of Bush I and Bush II to secure America`s
borders. Belatedly, they have awakened to what "going
along" has done to their country.

Because they did not want to get out of
step with Newt and Dole, too many conservatives went
along with NAFTA, Most Favored Nation trade status for
China and the surrender of sovereignty to the World
Trade Organization.

Result: $800 billion trade deficits,
deindustrialization of the nation, and a dependency on
foreigners for the necessities of our national life and
for the borrowed money to pay for them.

Now, they all wonder why manufacturing
jobs are leaving for China, why median family income no
longer rises as in the Reagan era, why the Reagan
Democrats are going home.

Because too many did not want to be seen
as not supporting a Republican president in time of war,
only six House Republicans voted to deny Bush a blank
check for war.

Did the rest have no grave concern about
the wisdom of invading

Mesopotamia to dethrone a tyrant and

democratize a nation that has never known democracy,
when George H.W. Bush himself,

wiser than his son, halted the Army of Desert Storm
rather than take Baghdad?

Because Bush demanded it, too many
conservatives went along with

No Child Left Behind, Medicare funding of
prescription drugs and the largest increases in social
spending since LBJ. And what did their capitulation to
Big Government Conservatism do for them, except earn
them the contempt of the base, which they manifestly
deserved?

Thinking is hard work, said Mark
Twain—that is why so few engage in it.

For too long, conservatives have not
been thinking, but living on the inherited intellectual
capital of the past. They have failed to see that the
world has changed since

Reagan`s time and we must change with it.

The truth is the prospective Republican
nominee is frozen in the past. Though an invasion of his
nation is taking place on the

border of his own state, John McCain is still
reciting
Emma Lazarus on the Golden Door. Though China
manipulated its currency to seize our markets and loot
our industry, and the European Union imposes value-added
taxes—tariff equivalents—on U.S. imports, McCain is
still babbling on about Smoot-Hawley.

Though the Cold War has been over for a
generation,
McCain has become more bellicose. He warns us new
wars are coming, demands the ouster of Vladimir Putin
from the G-8 and threatens Iran. If there is a single
tripwire for war laid down in the time of

Dean Acheson and

John Foster Dulles that John McCain thinks we should
pull up, or a single alliance he has urged us to review,
this writer has not heard of it.

With the president at 30 percent and the
party about to lose seats in both houses of Congress,
conservatives should not be closing ranks but demanding
to know why.

Huckabee has a chance to do himself a
world of good by piling up votes and delegates and
making himself a conservative alternative to McCain. But
he also has a chance to serve his party and country, by
putting on the table the issues neither party is
addressing.

Are we as overextended strategically and
militarily as we surely are financially and fiscally?
Should we stick with free trade if our rivals are rabid
economic nationalists? If we let

12 million to 20 million illegals stay, how do we
stop the

next 12 million to 20 million from coming in?

For his party`s and his country`s sake,
as well as his own, Mike Huckabee should keep the
conversation going. Because right now, his party is
looking at Hillary, Obama—or Bush`s third term.

COPYRIGHT

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Patrick J. Buchanan
needs

no introduction to VDARE.COM readers;
his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book
is Churchill,
Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its
Empire and the West Lost the World,
reviewed

here by

Paul Craig Roberts.