Thursday, March 3, 2011

Huckaboo

I wanted to talk about how Mike Huckabee's defense that saying that President Obama had grown up in Kenya had been a slip of a tongue had no internal logic, but Media Matters beat me to it. And why not, that's their J-O-B.

Think about it. What if I said, "Mike Huckabee clearly has an issue with white people after growing up in a township in aparthied era South Africa idolizing Nelson Mandela and dreaming of playing rugby. Wait. Did I say South Africa? A slip of the tongue. I meant 'Arkansas.'"

But nothing makes sense if you change it to say Arkansas. Except for the apartheid. Hahahaha. I kid. Nothing about his statement makes sense when you switch Indonesia for Kenya. Also, it leaves out the huge central element of him growing up with his father and grandfather, which he didn't. Isn't it a giant detail of the President's life that he grew up without a father? Doesn't saying that you meant to say that he spent time in Indonesia have to be coupled with the fact that you know he was estranged from his father? Nothing in that argument makes sense.

What does make sense is that Mike Huckabee is a bit more despicable than I thought him to be. I think this indicates that he knows exactly what he is up to and who he is appealing too. He will now run around the Right Wing stupidverse saying how everyone is just blowing this whole thing out of proportion around poor ole Huck. His audience already got what they wanted out of it. The corrections don't matter.

I want to talk about this in more detail at some point. I think FOX caught on to this a while back. It doesn't matter at all what you say. You put out the storyline you want. Lightly correct it later and keep going. No one who wants to believe it will heed the correction.

UPDATE:

Here is an even better piece on it describing how thoroughly stupid Huckabee's take is. I find it very hard to see it as anything other than a thinly veiled call to racism. What is this odd conservative obsession with Churchill anyway? I remember it being written about during the Bush presidency but what is there in it? President Obama moved a Churchill bust and installed a Lincoln bust. We all know that he would be criticized for doing the opposite as well. Does Huckabee find something wrong with Lincoln? Does anyone in England really care? Try this headline on:

Democrat Pres. Bows to Europe, Replaces American Hero with Foreign Leader.


Tell me that they wouldn't run that in a heartbeat and that would be the issue of the day. Then if he switched them back they would go on about what a weak flip-flopper he was. As a member of the Left, I think we should just push what children Conservatives are. What little babies. Ignorant, whiny little babies.

Oh. I forgot. Is Huckabee, in his book, saying that the American story isn't one of aligning ourselves with freedom seeking people everywhere? Are we not the City on the Hill. Maybe I misunderstood. Our sympathies should lie with the British Empire. The worst elements of the British Empire. That is 'our story' as Americans. Weird.

attempting to silence the voices in my head.