Reinventing history in the Republican primary.

Democrats lie about economics. Republicans lie about other things -- such as history.

Take Theopublican Mike Huckabee for instance. He recently claimed spoke of the signers of the Declaration of Independce as “brave people, most of whom, by the way, were clergymen.”

Huckabee made that up out of thin air. One signer was a clergyman when the Declaration was signed and there is some disagreement over whether two or three others had formerly been members of the clergy. There were 56 signatures on the document. For “most” of them to be clegy it would require that 29 of them, at minimum, be members of the clergy. In other words Huckabee was totally wrong about the facts.

Huckabee is a fundamentalist minister himself so his lack of knowledge regarding history is understandable.

One of the more bizarre claim, made in a similar manner, was something Ron Paul wrote to appeal to the religious right. Mr.Paul claimed: “Certainly the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both replete with references to God, would be agahst at the federal government’s hostility to religion.” Note: separation of church and state is not hostility to religion but neutrality.

Mr. Paul used a word with a very specific meaning. Replete means abundantly full. This would not be a passing mention but numerous, explicit references. The actual text of the Constitution has all of zero references to God. Mr. Huckabee was actually closer to being right even though he was far off the mark. Paul is always presenting himself as faithful to the Constitution, which would imply he has read it. Curious that he wrote the Constitution is full of references to God when it actually doesn’t have any.

The closest it gets is that the statement attached to the Constitution, verifying it was ratified, used the common dating term “in the Year of our Lord”. Even if you count that it hardly comes close to be abundant references to a deity.