A bizarre bit of political theater from the Huckabee campaign:

Talk about political jujitsu!

Mike Huckabee is holding a press conference right now in which he was supposed to unveil a new negative ad against arch rival Mitt Romney.

But Mr. Huckabee came to the press conference and announced he’d had a change of heart and would not be broadcasting the ad after all.

But wait! It gets better.

He then broadcast it for a room crammed with reporters, photographers and television cameras.

The assembled media found the display hilarious and at several points laughed out loud.

Huckabee’s melodramatic introduction, the one where he attempted to take the moral high ground while simultaneously wallowing deep in the muck, confirms the concerns that I’ve had about his character and judgement. His play here is so transparent and so slimy - so Clintonian - that a backlash would seem inevitable.

Update: 4:58 PM CST:
Video of the ad, shot at the press conference, can be seen here. I’m sure a better copy will be “leaked” via YouTube soon.

Update 4:40 PM CST:
The backlash was immediate. It continues to build. Huckabee might be toast before all is said and done. I’m adding commentary from the blogosphere below.

Others Blogging the Backlash:

Political Animal
We’ve all seen some very cheap stunts over the years, but they’re not usually this cheap and not this transparent. Reporters covering the campaign aren’t idiots, and Huckabee just insulted their intelligence.

Patterico’s Pontifications
Reading Huckabee’s quotes makes him sound entertaining and likeable, similar to Bill Clinton. He’s a great salesman … but I’m not buying.

Libertyblog
Gomer denounces the blatant cynicism of a campaign. His own.

ComMITTed to Romney!
I swear this guy is absolutely clueless, and he gets more ignorant by the moment.

Swampland
That sound you hear rumbling out of Des Moines appears to be a monumental implosion.

Marc Ambinder
The Romney campaign is already calling this a “meltdown.” Whatever it is, it’s a little bizarre.

The Real Clear Politics Blog
Why not just cancel the whole thing? It might have come off as a bit unorganized, but at least Huckabee would have been able to play the magnanimous card without the stench of clumsy opportunism, which will certainly be noted in the media reports.

Jonathan Martin
It’s the sort of gambit that will instantly trigger cynicism among the political class, especially given the confusion that surrounded the move.

Hot Air
It’s his entire cynical faux nice guy style of politics in microcosm — the man who’s so innocent and virtuous that he doesn’t even recognize the Machiavellian gambits he somehow keeps stumbling into.

California Yankee
Maybe, despite al the bravado, Huckabee doesn’t have the cash to run the ad. Whatever was behind Huckabee’s fiasco, it sure didn’t present the image of a decisive leader. I’m sure Carl Cameron’s report will have al Qaeda shaking in their caves.

Iowa Independent
A day after calling Mitt Romney “desperate” and “dishonest”, Mike Huckabee cancelled a negative commercial aimed at his chief rival in the Republican Caucus. Then he showed the commercial to the press and even encouraged them to tape it if they wanted to.

Stop the ACLU
This is what in politics is called utter B.S.

Right Up Front
This is going to be seen as the half-witted political maneuver that it is, and it could not come at a worse time for Huckabee as polls show him on the decline in Iowa and Mitt Romney on the uptick. Goodness, Mike. What were you thinking?

Riehl World View
But suddenly at Noon, no more negative attacks while standing surrounded by five placards of negative attacks and showing an attack ad to the press … and pledging to keep it positive from now on? How about, he doesn’t want to spend the money to buy air time and hopes the media will carry his water, instead? I’d like to think the press won’t lie down and play dumb for Huckabee, though I doubt it - some want him to be the nominee so bad, they won’t bother exposing the charade.

PoliGazette
Instead of being moral he acts like someone who donates thousands of dollars to charity and who, instead of doing it knowing that he’s doing the right thing and leave it at that, goes on to tell everyone how generous he is and how much money he exactly gave to those charities.

The QandO Blog
Yeah, right Mike. I’m sure they’ve never heard of “cynical manipulation” either. If they weren’t cynical before you began speaking they’re morons if they’re not cynical now. Yeesh.

A Chequer-Board of Nights
This is one of the most cynical and hypocritical things I have seen in politics.

The American Pundit
Huckabee is so full of crap I can smell him from here.

Outside the Beltway
Huckabee’s an idiot. More likely, though, he thinks we’re idiots.

Race 4 2008
Does he think we are fools?

Election Junction
In perhaps the single most brazen display of hypocrisy in politics in a long while, Republican Mike Huckabee held a press conference to say he’s above negative campaigning and then immediately went negative.

Say Anything
Huckabee likes putting on the airs of an “aw shucks” country pastor, but underneath I think he’s a lot more of a calculating, cynical politician than either he or his supporters are willing to admit. I’d even go so far as to say he’s a snake in the grass.

The Right’s Field
Huckabee’s really not experienced at the way these attacks are supposed to work, is he? You’re supposed to find a surrogate, not BE the surrogate handing out the ads to the media! It kind of ruins the whole “plausible deniability” thing when you’re doing the denying yourself.

Donklephant
What Huckabee pulled today was not only hilariously and woefully transparent, it also made him appear worse than the guy he was trying to smear.

On Deadline
If he loses Iowa’s caucuses, New Year’s Eve will forever mark the day Huckabee blew it — the day a crowd stopped laughing with the witty Republican and laughed at him.

The controversy continues to deepen with each passing day:

Rawalpindi’s police chief stopped doctors at the hospital where Benazir Bhutto died from conducting an autopsy, according to a lawyer on the hospital’s board.

In a video released Sunday, Benazir Bhutto, far right, appears through the sunroof before shots ring out.

It was a violation of Pakistani criminal law and prevented a medical conclusion about what killed the former prime minister, said Athar Minallah, who serves on the board that manages Rawalpindi General Hospital.

However, the police chief involved, Aziz Saud, told CNN that he suggested an autopsy be done, but that Bhutto’s husband objected.

It may take a little while but I think we’ll get to the bottom of this story and find the exact cause of her death.

This does seem to show her being shot but I wouldn’t say that it’s conclusive. There’s only one way to prove that the bullets actually made contact. I’ll continue to post videos as they surface.

The government won’t stand in the way:

The Pakistani government has no problem with officials from Benazir Bhutto’s political party exhuming the slain opposition leader’s body if they see a need to do so, an Interior Ministry spokesman said Saturday.

Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema made the remark when asked about comments from a top Bhutto aide who helped bathe Benazir Bhutto’s body after her death.

Sherry Rehman, Pakistan People’s Party information secretary, said it was clear that the former Pakistani prime minister suffered bullet wounds to her head, contrary to a government report that she died because she hit her head on a sunroof lever.

The details are secondary to the root cause, radical Islamic nutjobs, but the details do matter - to some anyway:

CNN national security analyst Ken Robinson, who worked in U.S. intelligence in Pakistan during the Clinton administration, said he suspects Bhutto’s enemies are attempting to control her legacy by minimizing the attack’s role in her demise.

“They’re trying to deny her a martyr’s death, and in Islam, that’s pretty important,” Robinson said.

Bhutto, he said, threatens to become more influential in death than she was in life. “Her torch burns bright now forever. She’s forever young; she’s forever brave, challenging against all odds the party in power and challenging the military and Islamic extremism.”

There’s something about these stupid, inconsequential stories that reveal so much about our society’s misplaced values:

An essay that won a 6-year-old girl four tickets to a Hannah Montana concert began with the powerful line: “My daddy died this year in Iraq.”

…”We did the essay and that’s what we did to win,” Priscilla Ceballos, the mother, said in an interview with Dallas TV station KDFW. “We did whatever we could do to win.”

She had identified the soldier as Sgt. Jonathon Menjivar, but the Department of Defense has no record of anyone with that name dying in Iraq. Caulfield said the mother has admitted to the deception.

Priscilla Ceballos is saying that she never claimed the essay was true:

“When [contest organizer Robin Caulfield] asked me if this [essay] was true, I told her no,” Ceballos said. “We never said this was a true story. We do essays all the time. My daughter does essays at school all the time. It never did say it had to be true, but [Robin] said, ‘That’s what we expected.’”

I guess it never said the author had to show good taste, judgment, parenting skills, or proper respect for the fallen either. The bottom line via Scared Monkeys:

THEY DO NOT DIE SO THAT 6 YEAR OLDS CAN WIN HANNA MONTANA TICKETS!!!

Exactly.

The exact cause of death seems to still be in question but the shooter/bomber can be seen in this video. I love how her security detail immediately seeks cover instead of working to protect Bhutto. Lives might have been saved, including their own, if they’d pounced on the gunman instead of ducking.

Rudy isn’t saying much in the video. His position is accurate enough but certainly not insightful. Thankfully, other statements made on the campaign trail contain more substance:

Campaigning across Florida on Thursday, Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani seized on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto as evidence that terrorism remains a central threat and that he is poised to combat it.

Giuliani said, if elected, he would increase U.S. military presence along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where terrorists harbor.

“From the outside, the most immediate thing that we could do is to make sure that we have the correct level of military forces in Afghanistan,” he said.

Giuliani said he would also increase the size of the U.S. military, adding 10 more combat brigades to the Army and expanding the Marine Corps from 185,000 to 200,000.

Ultimately, al Qaeda’s safe haven will have to be addressed and Rudy knows that Afghanistan is the foundation for further action.

There are a number of conflicting reports out there. The most recent one being the most surprising:

Pakistan’s interior ministry said Friday that Benazir Bhutto died from hitting her vehicle’s sunroof when she tried to duck after a suicide attack, and that no bullet or shrapnel was found in her.

Ministry spokesman Brigadier Javed Cheema said the opposition leader had died from a head wound she sustained when she smashed against the sunroof’s lever as she tried to shelter inside the car.

“The lever struck near her right ear and fractured her skull,” Cheema said. “There was no bullet or metal shrapnel found in the injury.”

I’m not sure that these details are relevant. However, I suppose that won’t stop the media from convening panels that toss around her decision to wave from the sunroof while ignoring the Islamic fundamentalists who initiated the barbaric attack.

Update 1:00 PM CST:
Now Farooq Naik, Bhutto’s lawyer, calls the sunroof story a lie:

“It is baseless. It is a pack of lies,” he said.

“Two bullets hit her, one in the abdomen and one in the head. It was a serious security lapse.”

None of this matters much in the end. It’s all just fodder for conspiracy theorists. I won’t be surprised when I receive email from Ron Paul supporters claiming that she was actually assassinated by a zombie sasquatch assassin sent by a secret CIA mind control program operating out of a subterranean base which was joint financed by the Zionist-controlled Federal Reserve and space aliens.

Update 11:40 AM CST:
CNN is confirming the sunroof lever story.

There isn’t a single rational statement made by this fruitcake during his Fox News appearance. The naivete on display here is just shocking. Ron wants America to curl up in a ball and ignore the Islamic threat:

“They have to deal with it. It’s their country not our country…The sooner we do less the better it is for them and for us.”

That is perhaps the most dangerous position a leader could take in the face of the global radical Islamic threat. Thank god this man is not a serious candidate.

Also Fruitcake Blogging:

Sword At the Ready
Okay - at what point will Americans wake up and realise this guy is a complete embarrassment to the country and the Republican Party?? Even the Democrats had more sense in their comments today!

The Astute Bloggers
It is well past high time that certain misguided Americans wake the hell up and drop their love affair with the sleazy and clueless Huckabee and/or the vapid Mr. Paul, and to get behind a Republican with experience, a sober understanding of world events, and the strength and will to pro-actively protect this country from the very Islamists who killed Ms. Bhutto today.

GOP Vixen
Already, Ron Paul is on Fox, whining that this means we should keep our noses out of Pakistan as well as every other country — that nuclear arsenal that could fall into the hands of Islamists, Ron, would definitely not stop at Pakistan’s borders, nor does the tug-of-war between moderates and extremists.

Hot Air
But in Ron Paul’s world, all problems are the result of the US taking action. Any action. Anywhere. Against anyone, doing anything. In the case of Pakistan, he says we should cut off aid to our “puppet” in Pakistan and make sure not to march in there with troops. There is, of course, at most a neglible possibility that we’ll send troops into Pakistan to do anything beyond taking on al Qaeda or securing the nukes. India might, but even that’s highly unlikely. And never mind that Pakistan’s history with democracy is sketchy, to say the least. Should we not have attempted to work with Musharraf against al Qaeda, Patriot Paul? Paul also tosses out the canard that we supported Osama bin Laden. Someone really needs to disabuse him of that notion one of these days. Someone should bone him up on the history of al Qaeda as well. It didn’t form because we support Musharraf, as Paul seems to think.

Romney proves, once again, that he is one of the few candidates who can speak plainly about the threat radical Islam poses to the entire free world.