I'll be your Huckleberry

Let's see if I've got this straight. Mike Huckabee went on a radio show this week and said that Obama was raised in Kenya. Of course, as his spokesman later explained:

Governor Huckabee simply misspoke when he alluded to President Obama growing up in ‘Kenya.’ The Governor meant to say the President grew up in Indonesia. When the Governor mentioned he wanted to know more about the President, he wasn’t talking about the President’s place of birth - the Governor believes the President was born in Hawaii. The Governor would however like to know more about where President Obama’s liberal policies come from and what else the President plans to do to this country - as do most Americans.

So, he just "misspoke," right? Slip of the tongue. Nothing to see here. Let's just move on.

End of story, right?

Not even close.

Two days later, our boy Huckleberry went on Bryan Fischer's radio show and said once again that he'd made a simple mistake:

And it's really an indication of just how pathetic some of these folks are who claim to be journalists and reporters and have failed to do a decent job. You know, I admitted that I misspoke on that, but I corrected it. But what I have never done is taken to position that Obama was born in Kenya or Indonesia or anywhere other than Hawaii where he claims to have been born.

(Cute, right? "...claims to have been born...")

But that just shows that Huckleberry is, in fact, a lying ball of snot.

First, let's go back to the original "mistake."

I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough. And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, [is] very different than the average American.

...if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.

Now, if you're paying attention, he didn't just say "having grown up in Kenya," he repeated the claim, and then specifically referenced the Mau Mau revolution. Which happened, not in Indonesia, but Kenya, in 1952.

If he had meant to say "Indonesia," why would he talk about Kenyan history?

Mostly because he wanted to talk about Obama's view of the British. If he'd said "Indonesia," he might have had to talk about Obama's view of the Dutch, who the Indonesians overthrew in 1949. (Really? The Dutch? Wooden shoes and tulips? Who wouldn't want to overthrow them? That would be almost as bad as being ruled over by the fucking Belgians...)

Golly, Obama returned the bust of Churchill! Which, you know, wasn't ours to begin with - it was on loan from the British government. But let's not let some pesky facts get in the way of a good narrative, right?

(And you know, really, who gives a crap that Obama lived in Indonesia? For four years - ages six through ten. God knows all my behavior patterns were set in stone by the time I was ten...)

As Capt Fogg already pointed out, Huckabee just wanted to paint Obama as "alien." Foreign. "Different from you and me."

Dark-skinned. Evil.

Huck went on O'Reilly, too. Which made Lawrence O'Donnell a little cranky.

In the interview, O'Reilly and Huckabee agreed that Obama grew up very differently from most people. Huckabee said that, unlike regular Americans, Obama did not grow up "going to Boy Scout meetings and playing Little League baseball in a small town." O'Reilly concurred, saying that Obama is "not a traditional guy," and that he's had a "different experience" from the "mom and apple pie" upbringing of most Americans.

This drew O'Donnell's ire. "Welcome to America, where most of us didn't grow up going to Boy Scout meetings," he said. "In fact, the vast majority of American men never had anything to do with the Boy Scouts."

O'Donnell then played a clip of Huckabee on a radio show, saying, "our communities were filled with Rotary clubs, not madrassas." That comment caused him to say that Huckabee was not telling the truth:

"If Huckabee and O'Reilly can stop lying about Barack Obama long enough to actually do some research...what they will soon discover to their utter astonishment, is that Barack Obama grew up in Hawaii, where there are Rotary clubs everywhere, but where I, for one, have never seen a madrassa,"

Other people have pointed out a few other problems with this view of Obama, too.

But in their attempts to portray Obama as devoid of traditionally American experiences, Huckabee and O'Reilly are pretending as if everyone else is growing up in fifties suburbia. In reality, we have a diverse country, and American upbringings are similarly varied. It's no less American to play basketball instead of baseball, or to spend your time at the beach instead of the Boy Scouts. As for O'Reilly's "mom-and-apple-pie upbringing," we're pretty sure Obama had a mom.

If the absence of Little League or Scout meetings is really so disconcerting to Huckabee, we wonder what he would say about Ronald Reagan, who also never participated in either of those things ("I never cared for baseball ... because I was ball-shy at batting," he once said). In fact, out of all our presidents, only George W. Bush is a former Little Leaguer, and only John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, and Bush were in the Boy Scouts. All of our other presidents, we guess, had an exotic, un-American upbringing, and a skewed worldview.

Of course, this is Huckleberry, who wants to establish a theocracy in America... (OK, maybe that's not fair. He just wants to amend the Constitution "to be in line with the Bible.")

He probably shouldn't have brought up scouting, either. After all, his son David was kicked out of the Boy Scouts for torturing and killing a dog. (Yup, that's the same son who was arrested a few years ago trying to smuggle a gun onto a plane.)

I'd say there's something wrong with how that boy was raised, for sure.

Oh, yeah. And by the way. Obama "probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather"? You know what other country had to throw off the yoke of British imperialism?

The United States.