There is a sudden storm of Huckabee-bashing, and I confess I don't understand it. Dick Morris has a good rebuttal today — Huckabee Is a Fiscal Conservative — and I have my own observations about the rest of the Republican frontrunners:

• Giuliani is pro-abortion, even partial birth abortion; anti-second amendment, soft on gay marriage, and pro-illegal immigration, but it's okay because he'll appoint "strict constructionist" judges to the Supreme Court.
• Romney has flip-flopped on gay rights, gun control, abortion, immigration and taxes. How do we know he's ready to stand still?
• Thompson flip-flop-flipped on the FairTax (he's in favor of it, right now), and by many accounts is lazy (like the story of his vacation in Paris in the middle of defending a drug dealer, giving the drug dealer grounds for appeal). He sounds folksy, though.
• McCain - Campaign Finance Reform, aka Incumbent Protection Act. Am I seriously supposed to stop blogging about politics the last few weeks before the election?

Of course, I'll support and vote for any of them rather than Hillary, Hussein or Haircut, but I'd rather get a principled, consistent conservative than Not-a-Democrat.

John the farmer was in the fertilized egg business. He had several hundred young layers (hens), called "pullets", and ten roosters, whose job it was to fertilize the eggs (for you city folks).

The farmer kept records and any rooster that didn't perform went into the soup pot and was replaced. That took an awful lot of his time, so he bought a set of tiny bells and attached them to his roosters.

Each bell had a different tone, so John could tell from a distance which rooster was performing. Now he could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report simply by listening to the bells.

The farmer's favorite rooster was old Butch, and a very fine specimen he was, too. But on this particular morning John noticed old Butch's bell hadn't rung at all! John went to investigate.

The other roosters were chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing. The pullets, hearing the roosters coming, would run for cover.

But to Farmer John's amazement, old Butch had his bell in his beak, so it couldn't ring. He would sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one. John was so proud of old Butch, he entered him in the Renfrew County Fair and he became an overnight sensation among the judges.

The result…The judges not only awarded old Butch the No Bell Piece Prize but they also awarded him the Pulletsurprise as well.

Clearly old Butch was a Democrat in the making: Who else but a Democrat could figure out how to win two of the most highly coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the populace and screwing them when they weren't paying attention?

Later, the farmer changed Butch's name to James Earl Carter, or just Al Gore for short.