Cutting Up Huckabee, Left and Right

In the Washington Post today, the new Republican White Hope is being carved up like a Christmas turkey from both sides of the political spectrum.

"Is the thought of Mike Huckabee as president just vaguely scary?" Eugene Robinson asks. "Or have we learned enough about the man that we should be hair-on-fire alarmed at the prospect...that he could actually win?

"Huckabee," former Bush speech writer Michael Gerson notes, "is managing to compromise his most distinctive virtue at the very moment the attention of the public is focused on his candidacy. In politics, a candidate can bend over backward so far that his spine snaps."

Robinson's complaints are that the former preacher is "anti-reason" in denying evolution, a "country bumpkin" in his uninformed attacks on Romney's Mormon faith and "the last person in the country to learn that U.S. intelligence agencies now believe Iran ended its nuclear weapons program four years ago."

Gerson faults Huckabee for accepting the endorsement of "one of the most divisive figures in the most divisive debate in American politics," Jim Gilchrist, founder of the anti-immigration group, the Minuteman Project, who has called for Bush's impeachment over failure to enforce border security and proclaims, "I will not promote violence in resolving this, but I will not stop others who might pursue that."

After being sliced from both directions, the Huckabee candidacy is left as a spineless carcass with no intellectual meat on its bones. Can somebody send the man a recipe for making turkey soup?