Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Huckabee’s pathetic public political self-mutilation


By PAT MURPHY
Express Staff Writer

No telling what confection of drugs drove Charlie Sheen to his notorious hotel room rampage and the ensuing meltdown that's made him an international spectacle of psychoses run wild.

We do know, however, what "drug" drove former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee into a fit of political self-mutilation that has stripped him of any believability as a serious presidential hopeful. Consider him now a permanent member of the pack of Republican crazies.

Huckabee is addicted to making any type of reckless, unfounded statement that he believes, in his delirium, will generate support for the GOP nomination, especially absurdities that belittle President Obama as a black man.

As if unhinged from reality, Huckabee strung along with a right-wing radio interviewer's questions about President Obama's African heritage. Huckabee embellished the chat with "facts" he created as he went along,

Obama grew up in Kenya, which Huckabee said, "I do know." Obama was more accustomed to Muslim madrasas (schools) than immersed in the activities of an American youth. His father and grandfather inculcated young Obama with such anti-British hatred that Obama as president contemptuously returned a bust of Winston Churchill. (Thrashed but good for his wild errors, Huckabee dutifully lied by saying he "misspoke"—it was Indonesia, not Kenya, although Britain had no role in Indonesia.)

Huckabee's rambling concoction of myth and ad-lib fiction was rejected as hogwash by conservatism's most reliable Republican commentator, George Will, who ticked off facts about where Obama grew up (five years in Indonesia, the rest in Hawaii), that Obama's passion for America-invented basketball makes him as American as apple pie and his bio of collegiate degrees and achievements "is as American as the other professor-president, Woodrow Wilson."

As for the Churchill bust, no Obama pique: The British Embassy loaned it after 9/11 to President George W. Bush. In its place in the Oval Office, Obama has placed a bust of the very American Abraham Lincoln.

(For good measure, Huckabee also denounced the "glorification" of Oscar actress Natalie Portman for being pregnant and unwed. Oh, such hypocrisy. Critics of Bristol Palin's unwed pregnancy, however, were "most shameful," Huckabee whined at the time. "Everyone understands we all mess up.")

In his Sunday Washington Post column, a fed-up George Will wrote, "Let us not mince words."

After listing five "plausible" Republican presidential candidates (Indiana Gov. Daniels, Mississippi Gov. Barbour, former Utah Gov. Huntsman, former Massachusetts Gov. Romney and former Minnesota Gov. Pawlenty), Will dismisses others as "careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons."




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