Mike Huckabee may be a likable preacher-man, but for all of his joviality and his good Christian ethics, he doesn’t seem too concerned about breaking the law. As Matt Taibbi points out, Huck may be the Republican “third way,” but he’s retained the religious nuttery and the ethical ignorance of the GOP we all know and love:
Mike Huckabee represents something that is either tremendously encouraging or deeply disturbing, depending on your point of view: a marriage of Christian fundamentalism with economic populism. Rather than employing the patented Bush-Rove tactic of using abortion and gay rights to hoodwink low-income Christians into supporting patrician, pro-corporate policies, Huckabee is a bigger-government Republican who emphasizes prison reform and poverty relief. In the world of GOP politics, he represents something entirely new — a cross between John Edwards and Jerry Falwell, an ordained Southern Baptist preacher who actually seems to give a shit about the working poor.
But Huckabee is also something else: full-blown nuts, a Christian goofball of the highest order. He believes the Earth may be only 6,000 years old, angrily rejects the evidence that human beings evolved from “primates” and thinks America wouldn’t need so much Mexican labor if we allowed every aborted fetus to grow up and enter the workforce. To top it off, Huckabee also left behind a record of ethical missteps in the swamp of Arkansas politics that make Whitewater seem like a jaywalking ticket.
And of course several of the ethical missteps came out of Huckabee’s religious zealotry. One of his first acts as governor of Arkansas was denying a Medicaid-funded abortion for a developmentally delayed 15-year-old girl who was raped by her stepfather. (Yes, that’s a violation of federal law). His views also compromised the educational opportunities of Arkansas schoolchildren, perhaps because his own intelligence seems to be slightly lacking (see his “humans didn’t descend from primates” comment, and please send him to 5th grade science class).
As president, Huck would support a constitutional amendment banning abortion and would give science a back seat to religion. “Science changes with every generation and with new discoveries, and God doesn’t,” he says. “So I’ll stick with God if the two are in conflict.” Huckabee’s well-documented disdain for science was reflected in the performance of the Arkansas school system when he was governor; one independent survey gave the state an F for its science standards in schools, a grade that among other things reflected Huckabee’s hostility toward the teaching of evolution.
Huckabee at most times is gentle and self-deprecating in his public address, but when he talks about religion, he gets weirdly combative and obnoxious, often drifting into outright offensiveness. At one appearance, Huckabee — who’s been known to make fart jokes in front of the state legislature — said he would oppose gay marriage “until Moses comes down with two stone tablets from Brokeback Mountain saying he’s changed the rules.” And he recently scored a rare offend trifecta, simultaneously pissing off immigrants, Jews and the pro-choice crowd when he ludicrously claimed that a “holocaust” of abortions had artificially created a demand for Mexican labor.
Admittedly, he is a pretty efficient offense-producer. He’s also greedy as all hell:
Huckabee also has a televangelist’s knack for getting caught with his fingers in various cookie jars. In his first year as governor, Huck used a $60,000 taxpayer fund for personal expenses like dog food, pantyhose and meals at Taco Bell. (One of his sons — also a very heavy man, as his father was — reportedly joked that “there’s not a Huckabee alive that can eat at Taco Bell for seven dollars.”) The governor also tried to keep $70,000 in furnishings for the governor’s mansion supplied by a local cotton grower, and used inaugural funds to pay for clothes for his wife. “Mike is first and foremost about Mike,” says Brantley. “He’ll nickel-and-dime whoever he can to line his pockets.”
Huckabee has also been accused of paying himself as a consultant to his own senatorial campaign, allowing special interests to pay for airline tickets for his daughter, receiving a canoe from a Coke bottler and — hilariously, if you’re wont to laugh at the sheer small-town gauche greediness of it all — setting up a “wedding registry” at Target and Dillard’s department stores so citizens could lavish the Huckabees with gifts as they renewed their marriage vows. The long list of desired goodies included twenty-four settings of Lenox “Holiday Nouveau” china, a KitchenAid mixer and a “Jack La Lanne power juicer.” If you didn’t want to pick out something yourself, the Huckabees were glad to take straight cash. “Message from the couple,” the registry noted. “Target GiftCards are welcome.”
The fat-shaming and the classism are not endearing me to Mr. Taibbi, but facts in between are pretty damning. And then there’s the fact that Huckabee released a convicted rapist from prison, despite having been warned by the man’s victims that he would certainly rape and kill again — and indeed, Wayne Dumond did rape and kill again.
Oh, and the reason that “tough on crime” conservatives were so gung-ho about getting Dumond released? Because the high school girl he raped was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton’s, and the daughter of a major Clinton donor.
Huckabee also lied about the information he had about Dumond. (Didn’t someone get impeached a while back for lying about something much, much less serious than rape and murder?).
He’s ignorant and foolish. He shows total disregard for women’s lives, but has quite a soft spot for rapists. He’s a liar. He has no moral or ethical compass, and tries to compensate by talking about God a lot.
In other words: Huckabee isn’t a new kind of Republican. He’s the same old shit.
Thanks to D.N. Nation for pointing me to this story.