I Liked Mike

Mike Huckabee seems like a desirable enough candidate -- smart, not overly hack-ish, right on most moral issues, and perhaps most importantly, someone who could bring civility back to the Hill. But I'm officially un-enamored.

Today's WaPo did the trick, with this passage about two newly articulated Huckabee policies:

... Huckabee sought to build his foreign policy credentials, meeting with a group of retired generals who are in Des Moines to urge the 2008 candidates to commit to opposing torture. After the meeting, Huckabee joined Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in declaring his opposition to the interrogation procedure known as "waterboarding," and said he would support closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a contrast with the other leading Republicans.

You can't be for closing Guantanamo unless you have a decent answer to the question of what you would do with the lovely people who bow toward Mecca from there. Return them to countries that won't have them? Give them trials in the U.S., where their attorneys would exploit our freedoms for the benefit of those who have professed their intentions to kill us by the millions?

And I don't care how uncomfortable or terrifying waterboarding may be to the few who deserve it. It's non-lethal, doesn't bruise the skin, break the bones, starve the tummy, or stretch the skeleton -- yet it can open sealed lips.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line also reminds us that Huckabee said we should stay in Iraq because "we broke it." I suppose we broke Europe, Japan and the South, too, but they were well worth the breaking -- and did a fair amount of their own breaking before we straightened them out.

If Huckabee doesn't understand that we're staying in Iraq to fix it, but more importantly, to stop global jihad before it breaks us, then he's just too 9/10 to attract my vote.