Huckabee blows his line
That Huckabee wit that's gained him some notoriety lately failed him tonight:
Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, greeted the entry of a fellow Southerner into the race with a country music dig. “You know, Fred is from Nashville, Tenn., home of George Jones, who was often called ‘no-show George’ for not showing up at his concerts,” he said. “And maybe Senator Thompson will be known as the no-show for the presidential debates.Actually, it's "No-show Jones", and he wrote a song about it making fun of himself. And Jones lives in Nashville, but he's from East Texas.
Penraker thinks Huckabee was calling Thompson a drunk by comparing him to The Possum. (By Penraker's standards he would also be accusing him of cocaine abuse.) I think it was just a lame joke, but if I were Fred I would relish George Jones comparisons. The man is a country music icon with a huge following, and like Fred he radiates roguish Southern charm and populist authenticity. Jones certainly isn't my favorite country singer but I have to give him credit for recording what has been called the #1 country song of all time. And he sang another one with a particular resonance for Fred, as the pundits try to tag him as looking "frail":
Ain't ready for the Junkyard yet...
PS: I'm not going to link it, because this is a high-class blog, but I just saw the weirdest thing on You Tube I've ever seen looking for that Rockin' Chair video.
Okay, imagine a three minute pastiche of Boris Vallejo-type D&D and sci-fi fantasy novel artwork--but just the cheesecake paintings, buxom space-vixens and dryads au naturel, some of them not entirely safe for work. All set to the stirring, soulful strains of... George Jones' The Grand Tour.
That disturbed me. Perhaps it was a mirror into the dark recesses of my own soul, or perhaps it was just goofy.