Mike Huckabee: The Craven Christian

Politics and religion don't mix. Really, they shouldn't mix. Actually, they're not meant to mix, especially in the United States, where our Constitution calls for a separation of Church and State.

Now, that doesn't mean that men of the cloth can't dabble in politics. We've had clergymen serve in Congress before, including two Catholic priests. But that doesn't mean political clergymen can bring their faith to the floor of Congress, and conversely, it shouldn't mean that professional clergymen should bring politics to the pulpit.

Religious politicos are no different to the usual corrupt variety in having feet of clay - after all, look at all the sexual shenanigans which occurred in that poor excuse of a "church" on C Street which doubles as a home for wayward Christian congressmen. However, I have to say, until this week, I'd actually thought Mike Huckabee above all that stuff.

Huckabee, to me, actually seemed an anomaly, because he looked and sounded like a nice Republican - a dying breed and a bit of an oxymoron these days, I know; but he did seem, politics apart, to be a genuinely nice man.

Being a genuinely nice man is no real qualifier. He is a Republican, an ordained clergyman who believes that religion and politics are indelibly intertwined, a social and fiscal conservative. He would never get my vote, but he impressed me simply because he wouldn't rise to the vicious and nasty bait others in his party doled out regarding demonisation of the Left.

But like everyone else in the GOP at the moment, it seems Huck's not immune from suffering from their particular and current brand of meanness which just amounts to nothing more than not-so-cleverly disguised racism.

Until recently, Huck's been one of a handful of Republicans whom I thought had balls enough to give the President credit from time to time. When the President made the unannounced visit to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to meet and salute the returning coffins of servicemen killed in Afghanistan, Huckabee praised this, saying he was proud, at that moment, that Obama was his President. He even made a soft-pedaled criticism of the current Republican mean girls, Palin and Bachmann, and Rush Limbaugh, in their persistent bitchery about the First Lady's campaign against childhood obesity. And I believe in his past as a clergyman, he's encouraged and even opened his own churches up in welcoming African Americans into his Southern Baptist congregations.

Currently, Huckabee's leading in most of the polls regarding potential GOP Presidential candidates for 2012. He's running ahead of Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty and Newt Gingrich; and I guess life at the top of the poll got to him this week. The previous week saw him pasting political rival Romney regarding the prototypical healthcare package he initiated in Massachusetts, which eventually became Obamacare.

However, this week, Huckabee let his political ambitions belie the Christianity he wears on his sleeve, and he succumbed to the temptation of The Big Lie mentality, in order to firm his roots with the teabagging base of the Republican Party. In an interview on a conservative talk radio station, Huckabee sought to smear the President of the United States as rabidly anti-American and sought to explain this perceived "anti-Americanism" as a result of Obama's having been raised in Kenya, with his father and his grandfather, the latter imbuing him with a virulent strain of anti-colonialism acquired as a result of his having been incarcerated during the Mau Mau Rebellion of the 1950s.

The interview was lengthy, in depth and repeated the meme of Obama's "Kenyan" upbringing, which was a base lie. Anyone who's read the President's autobiography Dreams of My Father, knows that Barack Obama Jr didn't meet his old man until he was ten years old. That was the first and last time. He actually didn't visit Kenya until he was a grown man.

A day later, Huckabee tried to walk back the lie as a misspoken irrelevance. He wasn't actually referring to Kenya, you see; he was referring to Indonesia (where the President did, indeed, spend a great deal of his childhood, living with his mother and stepfather). If that were the case, then why didn't Huckabee's interviewer attempt to correct him, rather than letting him vent about the President being anti-American as a result of his Kenyan uppringing?

Oh, it was to promote the lie that's currently found, if not on most Republicans' lips, then most certainly at the backs of their tiny minds. The President's not one of us. He's different. His name is foreign in a way ours have never been foreign before, and he certainly looks different.



The most extreme of the Republican base openly doubt the fact that the President is even American, maintaining the birthers' mantra that he was born in Kenya - something which if John Boehner and Eric Cantor won't correct amongst their voters, then Huckabee has always been at pains to disdain; but in his interview, the foremer Arkansas governor and ordained Baptist minister merely changed tack and altered the goalposts around the birther theory: Obama may have been born in the United States, but let's get the message out that he was raised in Kenya and absorbed anti-colonial opinions from his father and grandfather, which formed the basis of his political ideals which he hopes to foist on the United States.

As a well-known Republican sage might snark, that's kinda oxymoronic.

It's oxymoronic because, as Americans, we're all supposed to be anti-colonialists. That's why we revolted against the old country. We were second class colonials, and we wanted to be their equals. That's part of our American identity. I don't get it. Is Huckabee coming down on the side of the Brit in the Mau Mau Rebellion, because if it does, it says an awful lot about Mike Huckabee.

Yes, the rebellion was a reaction by native Kenyans against British rule, and it resulted in the British instituting concentration camps and torturing various rebels. Is Huckabee endorsing that sort of behaviour engendered by the white British rulers against their black indigneous subjects? If so, what does that say about Mike Huckabee?

Because, really, that's what this whole Kenyan thing is about - the whole Kenyan, birther, secret Muslim dynamic. It's simply a euphemism for the fact that the Republican base, and many of its elected officials, don't like the fact that the President is black.

In the 21st Century, it's all about race. The President is black. He's not like us. He has African roots, from the country of Kenya, his father was an atheist, he was given a Muslim name and his grandfather opposed a colonial authority. Therefore, he's a Manchurian candidate, dumped in the White House by the subversive Left in order to lead us all down the unrighteous path of socialism, communisim, fascism, whateverism happens to be worrying the Teabaggers on a particular day of a particular month at a particular time of day.

It's racism, and Huckabee, ordained man of God and gentle Christian pastor, is pushing a lie, in order to consolidate his pre-eminence as a viable Presidential candidate amongst the Republican base. This other man from Hope, Arkansas, is dispelling the man who offered us the audacity of hope solely because the colour of his skin is not the type they would hope to be seeing sitting in the White House, unless it were in a servile capacity.

Never mind the fact, as Joan Walsh recently pointed out, that the President was raised by a Caucasian mother from Kansas and his Caucasian, middle-class grandparents in Hawaii. As she reiterated, no one wants to speak of them. Why emphasize Obama's American roots at all, when his Kenyan heritage serves the ulterior purpose of delegitimising him so effectively?

Well, if the Kenyan heritage is all that matters for these people, perhaps they need to address these "Kenyans" who happen to be relatives of our President: Brad Pitt, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis.

If Obama's mother's heritage doesn't count, then that must mean that all of the above are Kenyans, surely, because they are lateral relations of the President, and in the case of Davis, the President is directly descended from him.

Pitt apart, knowing that the President claimed real kinship with any of the others would be a plus factor in the South and parts of the rural Midwest. It would make him a fully paid-up member of the club, eligible to be included as part of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a bubba.

Just imagine how that would play in the Red States.

And, maybe, if Mike Huckabee just scratched the surface enough, he'd find that he might be Kenyan too.

Prize Package or Trojan Horse?

Well, it passed the Senate, and of course, it's not to everyone's liking. My faux Conservative friend from Virginia e-mailed me today whingeing about the fact that his son and all his as yet unborn grandchildren were going to be the inheritors of a 'massive debt' due t0 our rapid descent into socialism. My heart bleeds for him ... not. I've lived under semi-socialism and it's not that bad. Honestly.

From what I can glean from the bill the Senate cut, pared and finally passed is that they're proposing a system by which the government 'buys' all the bad banks and sort of cleans them up and re-positions them. This is similar to what was done not too long ago in Norway; only there the bigger banks absorbed a lot of the smaller, less solvent ones under the bigger banks' aegis. I suppose our plan is semi-socialistic. I don't know. I can't pretend to understand economy as I've never been quite the one for maths, science and the lot, especially maths.

I know the Republicans are moaning about there not being enough tax cuts, but I can't see what that would accomplish. In an economically hard time, if you hand people more money in the form of tax cuts, middle- and working-class people are going to put this money aside in savings. Hand a tax cut to a wealthy person or a wealthy business establishment and they might spend; but we all know that trickle down simply didn't ... er, trickle down. The Republicans' behaviour has simply astounded me during the past week or so, especially in the Senate.

Talk about sour grapes. They're dangerously echoing the stated sentiment of their real leader, Rush Limbaugh, in wanting, willing Obama to fail. And I must admit, I've been more than a bit perplexed and critical of Obama in the past seven days, for his repeated attempt at 'peace, love and understanding' the Republican party in the name of bi-partisanship.

Mr President, these are not nice people. You've made your point. You've tried. They just aren't that into you as a President. They're bitter, twisted, angry, jealous, old and white. They tried. They failed. They're not going to get over it, so you and the Democratic party better develop some backbone and fast. Charlie Crist might be an exception; but Charlie Crist isn't sitting in Congress or the Senate with that disapproving old maiden-faced Mitch McConnell breathing down his neck or Lindsey Graham throwing hissy fits.

Mr President, kick ASS. Start by respectfully retiring that Mormon gentleman, Harry Reid. (A Mormon and a Democrat? That's an oxymoron, if ever there was one - or should I say oxyMormon?) I suggest making Jim Webb Senate majority leader. He's a man who takes no quarter and doesn't suffer fools gladly. (The fact that he's also a Virginian and from my native state, is an added bonus).

And listening to Tim Geithner's explanation of the bailout package .... well, hmmmmmmmmm, is all I can say. Part of it sounds suspiciously like stuff Bush propounded: like not holding the banks who got themselves up shit creek responsible for the dodgy mortgages and cruddy loans made to people who, unfortunately, didn't have repayment means.

Finally, I'm amused and dismayed and more than a bit peeved at the reaction of Mike Huckabee to the Stimulus Package. Governor Huckabee is one of the more likeable Republicans. He seems a nice man, in a Christian sort of way - and there's the rub. The very aspect that makes him likeable, also makes him 'unlikeable' as well. He reared the ugly head of Christianity when he slammed the fact that the Stimulus Package prohibited higher education funds from being allotted to Schools of Divinity. Quite bloody right. Someone's FINALLY thinking along Constitutional lines now in the Senate, especially after Obama's less-than-subtle wink in the direction of those people in the US who define themselves as secular. Federal money shouldn't be given to divinity schools. We have no established church nor do we have an established religion, and in no way should the government fund the education of clergymen or men of faith. It's a private matter. I see also, he went on to slam some of the agencies to which federal money had been allotted - like those evil women socialists who front Emily's List.

You know, they say the Republicans won the first round of the PR war last week with all their posturing and pirouetting about how bad the proposed Stimulus Package was; they did this with their usual 'fear tactics', with smear and appealing to the base, yet again. I was worried that some people, people who would normally have endorsed a Republican candidate, might have reverted to type in this first crisis of the new Administration. Therefore, I was glad the President moved swiftly, both in his Press Conference and in his visits to communities in Indiana and Florida. Obama is a great communicator. You have only to listen to him speak and then listen to some jumbled garbage propagated by Bush to understand the difference. The former speaks the people in the audience. He speaks directly to them. Take 49 people out of an audience of 50 and Obama would still sound the same way, as if he's speaking directly to the people. And he is. Maybe I'm naive, maybe I've been out of the country too long, maybe I'm just stupid and starstruck that after 8 years we have a President who can string a subject and a predicate together and come up with a coherent thought; but I trust Obama. I trust him in a way I've never really trusted any government leader in my voting lifetime. He seems sincere. I believe he's sincere, although I might be wrong. Listening to his predecessor was a painful exercise in anger management. I cannot believe the stupidity levels of American voters to have elected a cretin like George Bush, and to give him a second term and free reign to rape and pillage the Constitution. That single act by the American people gave credence to the addage that people get the government they deserve.

Well, we finally got one right, it seems - at least for the moment. I think Obama did the right thing in making those two trips and playing them out before the public. I hope he does more of that. Why? Because it will galvinise the people to contact their representatives and hold their feet to the fire in supporting a President who wants to work for his people - and not just the people who elected him, but those who didn't either. Maybe I'm wrong about Obama, but I hope not. A week after the Inauguration, I was speaking with one of my aunts in Virginia. She'll turn 80 this year. I asked how she liked the new President.

'Just fine,' she said. 'I've lived long enough to see a People's President.'

I have as well.