The Iowa caucasians

On display with Mike Huckabee last night in Iowa, which is whiter than Chuck Norris's teeth, were, oddly enough, Chuck Norris's teeth. Huckabee, the affable rube who scoffs at the fact of biological evolution and theorizes instead that the universe was created by magic 6,000 years ago with all species intact, appropriated Norris to lend intellectual heft to his victory in the Iowa caucasians.

Because not only is Chuck Norris an ass kicking star of infomercials with a beard as mighty as Saddam Hussein's, he's also a prominent First Amendment scholar. Most Mondays, Norris, together with a creepy whackjob called Vox Day, holds forth on the United States Constitution etc. in the virtual pages of World Nut Daily.

For example, in answering the question — a question that "sends shivers down the spine of skeptics" — Is America a Christian Nation?, Norris quotes approvingly from a letter by John Jay, one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, claiming a "duty ... to select and prefer Christians for [our] leaders." Unfortunately Norris doesn't address how this observation comports with Article VI, which forever bans religious tests for public offices.

Nor does it say much for Huckabee rival Mitt Romney or Orrin Hatch, Mormons who many of Norris's fellow Huckabee supporters denounce as dangerous cultists.

Speaking of Huckabee's well advertised Christianity, the candidate has come under fire from a host of conservative pundits for, inter alia, showing mercy to a number of convicted criminals while he was governor of Arkansas. If they really do prefer a True Follower™ of Jesus, this seems like a strange thing to criticize him for. Even as a skeptic quaking in abject fear at the very words of Chuck Norris, it seems to me that Jesus was all about mercy.

Perhaps they prefer the Jesus of the ergot poisoning-fueled hallucinations in the Book of Revelation, who shows up to boil reprobates like Orrin Hatch and Joe Lieberman in a lake of fire.

In other news from the Iowa cauci, conservative Republican Saviour Sleepy Fred Thompson trounced Alan Keyes and Duncan Hunter but only narrowly edged past Ron Paul, another candidate disfavored by the GOP faithful, whom they regularly deride as an isolationist libertardian jihad-enabler in a blimp.

Poor old Fred, the Hollywood candidate, was barely mentioned during the teevee cockeye coverage last night.