I had the pleasure of meeting “Captain” Ed Morrisey of Captain’s Quarters Blog at CPAC.  He’s a very likable guy and I’ve been reading his stuff for years now.  Today he has an excellent post-mortem on the Republican primary race and the roll that religion - and more importantly religious bigotry - played in it.

Much of the Mitt-O-Sphere is still grappling with the reality that - but for religion - this primary race would have been much different.  I summed up my opinions on this matter some time ago.

Ed expands on Dan Gilgoff’s commentary and likens it to being “hoisted by one’s own petard”.  I like to think I have a pretty good vocabulary, but I did in fact have to look up the word “petard” in order to fully understand Ed’s meaning.  In order that you might better understand the image, I hearken you back to one of the final scenes of that classic military thriller The Hunt For Red October.

The Soviet Alpha-class sub has fired a torpedo at the Red October after the Alpha’s commander ordered all safety devices removed from the weapon.  This meant that the torpedo went “active” the moment it left the tube.  After some high-speed maneuvering by the Red October and the USS Dallas, the Soviet torpedo ends up locking on to the Alpha.  Just before impact, the Alpha’s first officer looks at his captain and utters one of the movie’s most memorable lines:

You arrogant ass!  You’ve killed us!

That, dear reader is what it means to be hoisted over your own petard.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear.  Unless John McCain is arrogantly stupid enough to put Mike Huckabee on his ticket, he’ll get my vote.  The War and the Court is just too important to me to blow off the presidency for either four or eight years of Obama or Hillary.

In the event that either Obama or Hillary take office this coming January, there will be plenty of evidence that Evangelicals, their “leaders” and especially Mike “It’s All About Me” Huckabee will have hoisted themselves, the Republican Party, and America over their own petard.

Maybe George Will is right.  Perhaps America was more enlightened a century ago.