President Bush’s former spokesman Ari Fleischer today called Mike Huckabee’s Foreign Affairs comments “unwarranted and unwise“:

There is much to like about Mike Huckabee. But he will serve Republican primary voters, and our nation, better if he focused his criticisms on the Democrats who will run against our eventual nominee and not on the President who has kept us safe.

Yesterday, Mitt Romney also said that Huckabee “ought to be saying thank you to the president for keeping us safe these last six years.”

During a campaign stop for Rudy Giuliani this week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) criticized President Bush, saying “George Bush isn’t and he never was” a “real fiscal conservative” or “a bonafide Reagan Republican.” Perry, who succeeded Bush in Texas, also criticized Bush’s tenure as governor:

“Rudy is a real fiscal conservative. He’s a bonafide Reagan Republican. George Bush isn’t and he never was,” Perry said on the videotape.

The Governor extolled Giuliani’s conservative credentials. But at the expense of President Bush, who Perry characterized as too big a spender — even during his days in Texas.

“George Bush was spending money,” Perry told the gathering. “George has never ever been a fiscal conservative.”

On PBS’ Bill Moyers Journal this past Friday, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann criticized right-wing radio host Michael Savage, who had a show on MSNBC in 2003. Olbermann recounted how he nearly walked off the set of his Countdown show once when MSNBC told him to run a commentary by Savage.

Describing why he was opposed to including the segment, Olbermann said Savage’s show was “basically just spattering invective on people he didn’t like“:

MSNBC hired a guy named Michael Savage. And he came on and did– not only did he do a show once a week that was basically just spattering invective on people he didn’t like and these people change from week to week, but it was terribly produced. I mean, it was an awful show.

Watch it:

The right wing blog Newsbusters, which is a project of the Media Research Center, came to Savage’s defense yesterday, calling Olbermann’s criticism a “hysterical utterance.” “He also had the unmitigated audacity to criticize conservative radio host Michael Savage,” wrote Newsbusters’ Noel Sheppard.

While Newsbusters has every right to disagree with and criticize Olbermann, it is laughable to suggest that someone needs “unmitigated audacity” to criticize Michael Savage. Here are just a few examples of the “spattering invective” that Savage regularly spews on his show:

“90 percent of the people on the Nobel Committee are into child pornography and molestation.” — Michael Savage [12/12/2007]

“Of all of the dictators in the past, you know the one Al Gore strikes me as [being] closest [to] is Mussolini.” — Michael Savage [7/9/2007]

“Notice what this double-talking slut just did, this mind-slut Barbara Walters. And I stick by those words. She’s an empty mind-slut.” — Michael Savage [3/16/2007]

Madeline Albright is “a traitor. In my opinion, she should be tried for treason, and when she’s found guilty, she should be hung.” — Michael Savage [10/9/2006]

“Liberalism is, in essence, the HIV virus, and it weakens the defense cells of a nation.” — Michael Savage [7/6/2006]

In July 2003, MSNBC fired Savage after he referred to a caller as a “sodomite” and said he should “get AIDS and die.”

To Newsbusters, it appears that the problem isn’t Savage’s “hysterical utterances,” but the fact that MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have the “unmitigated audacity” to decide that they don’t want to be associated with it.

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Mark Kleiman has some wise thoughts on the conservative establishment’s hatred of Mike Huckabee. It should also be said, however, that on a more basic level a Huckabee nomination would be an electoral fiasco for the Republican Party. Not just in the race for the White House, but down ballot as well. If you’re Gordon Smith or Susan Collins or Norm Coleman the difference between the Republican nominee being Romney/Rudy/McCain or being Huckabee is enormous.

Whenever the Republican Party is in trouble, it’s always worth revisiting Christopher Caldwell’s classic 1998 Atlantic piece “The Southern Captivity of the GOP”. The past nine years have, in many ways, run against Caldwell’s thesis. But I think the best way of reading him is as offering not a prediction as such, but a kind of warning: Given the size and distinctiveness of the South as a region, and given the GOP’s dominance of that region, the party is perpetually runs the risk of becoming a merely southern party.

The most successful Republican politicians of the “southern strategy” era, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, were Californians who were personally indifferent to religion and both led political coalitions that extended far beyond the south and its brand of evangelicism. Bush, in keeping with the more modest nature of his political coalition, is a Texan able to present himself as southern to fellow southerners. But on the national stage he overwhelming identifies himself with the iconography of the West — cowboy boots, clearing brush, a ranch — rather than with the south. And, again, for all his political reliance on evangelicals, he’s actually a Methodist.

A Huckabee-led Republican Party would, even if it got its act together and started offering a well-briefed candidate with cutting-edge policies out of the conservative think tax universe, be very very very Southern and not even in a particularly “New South” kind of way. You could pull this off, perhaps, under generally favorable political circumstances, but given the bad overall climate it’d be a recipe for disaster.

In April, a questioner asked Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) if an attack on Iran was in the works. “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran,” McCain responded, to the tune of the Beach Boys’ Barbara Ann. (Watch it.) NBC’s First Read reports that, at an event in South Carolina on Saturday, a man reminded McCain of that moment and asked what he will do now in the wake of the NIE that says Iran has shut down its nuclear program:

McCain’s response: “No thanks for reminding me, you jerk. [Laughter]. I don’t know where the intelligence came from. But, if you are enriching the material then it doesn’t take long to make a nuclear weapon. Second, I don’t detect a change in Iranians behavior…they still pose a threat to our country.”

UPDATE: Back in September, when a high school student asked McCain whether he was too old and too conservative to be president, McCain responded, “Thanks for the question, you little jerk. You’re drafted.”