David Corn

Over the past few months, Jim Pinkerton, my regular sparring partner on Bloggingheads.tv, has regularly rushed to the defense of Mike Huckabee. When I wondered aloud whether Huckabee really does believe that angels intervened when he was in a hunting contest (to help him kill an elk), Pinkerton pooh-poohed my secularistic skepticism. When I uncovered a little-known 1998 book in which Huckabee lumped together environmentalism and pornography, seemingly compared homosexuality with necrophila, and insisted that people who "do not walk in faith" tend to be "immoral, impure and improvident," Pinkerton claimed I was taking the former Arkansas governor's comments out of context. (I begged to differ.)

So it did not come as a shock when I heard that Pinkerton, who was a domestic policy adviser for the first President Bush, had suspended his career as pundit to go to work for Huckabee's presidential campaign.

Pinkerton is a quirky, independent-minded, and affable conservative, which is why I have enjoyed working with him on bhTV. He proudly wears the paleocon badge, and he has been against the Iraq war from the start, blasting away at the neocons and their imperial ambitions. He's a fierce hawk on immigration. No fence is too big or too large for him. He has railed repeatedly on bhTV that elites (I guess that includes me) just don't get it--the "it" being the supposed widespread and deep popular anger about illegal immigrants. He's also a utopian advocate of space exploration. He wants off Planet Earth. Matt Yglesias recently poked at Pinkerton's way-out notions.

I wonder whether Huckabee and his campaign realize what they're getting with Pinkerton. Perhaps they're comfortable with his blistering attacks on George W. Bush and the neocons--even though Huckabee stands with Bush and the hawks on the Iraq war. I doubt Huckabee would take personal offense at Pinkerton's argument that the defense of "Christendom" (against creeping Muslimization) ought to be the organizing principle of U.S. policy. But does Huckabee need more attention drawn toward his fundamentalism?

In vetting Pinkerton, did the Huckabee-ites consider one of his proposals for domestic security: put a cop in front of every mosque in America. Yes, that's what he said during a recent Bloggingheads.tv match-up. He was serious. Quite serious. You can see for yourself right here:

If you watched the clip, you saw that when I questioned his idea, Pinkerton said that "we can have some elections on this issue." So is Pinkerton now advising Huckabee to call for police surveillance of every mosque in the nation? I'd sure like to be the fly on the wall for that meeting. Or when Pinkerton says to Huckabee that he ought to unfurl the flag of "Christendom." Or when he tells Huckabee that space is the place.

As I said, I do like Pinkerton. He is engaging and possesses (as you can tell) an unorthodox mind. I wish him well, though not success, for a Pinkertonian Huckabee is a rather daunting (if not frightening) prospect to consider.