The Fat Man's Protest

So did you hear Mike Huckabee's opinion on laws requiring one to have a birth certificate to confirm one's gender at birth before using public toilets?  Did you cringe, like I did?  With recent advances in upholding the civil rights of gay people, the "Christians" seem to be running scared and that usually means trotting out the hyperbole, the ridiculous analogies and the bogus scenarios.

"I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today'"

Said the chubby man who would be President.  That's not a pretty picture and not a picture I enjoy holding in my mind, but the point is that the rabble rousing that involves scenarios of some guy dressed as a woman raping your daughter in the Lady's Room is fiction. If some dude wanted to dress up and explore the fabulous world of toilets, there would be no law likely to stop him, no DNA test or passport control at the door.  Indecent exposure laws, where they apply, are still in place.

Transgendered people have been using washrooms of choice  for decades and so far, I don't know of a problem, nor (and I've asked) do women normally walk around naked in public toilets.  Sorry, Mike, the athlete formerly known as Bruce Jenner isn't going to molest your wife or your darling daughter nor will anything be exposed outside of a toilet stall.  You'll never know. 

Frankly, remembering the alarming record of Republican politicians who rant about sex and gender and protecting the world from homosexuality being caught doing naughty things to boys in cloakrooms or sitting with "wide stances" in airport mens' rooms and sleazy motels, I'd rather not share a bathroom with Mike at all.  Methinks the fat man doth protest too much.

Cry Havoc

If there's anything being shoved down our throats these days, it's the claim that health care reform is being shoved down our throats. It's all part of the game the minority party is playing by trying to make you think the Democrats won the White House by some sort of fluke and that the desire for health care reform wasn't what Obama's majority of voters were hoping for.

It's been a year now and the screaming hasn't let up for a moment, but a recent poll shows that half the country favors the Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act, whether or not you call it ObamaCare and only 43% think it's "too liberal."

It would be amusing of course if the bumper sticker bumpkins did get their "end of an error" by electing Mitt Romney who like the rest of them is giving us that old soft shoe about just how terrible the new law is because as the unimpaired remember, Mitt only a few years ago was hoping his new Massachusetts health care reform would go nationwide. It's easy to call a politician like that a whore, but it's unfair to whores and I don't want to distract from his fellow streetwalker who has been spending a fortune with TV ads warning us of the holocaust, the disaster, the calamity, the apocalypse sure to wipe us from the earth if we have to have health insurance rather than hope the emergency room can cure our cancer or heart disease -- at public expense. I mean never mind the war, conquest, famine and death -- this is health care!

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.

Huckabee on the carpet

British comedian Ricky Gervais recently put together a short TV comedy series, Idiots Abroad; seven episodes indulging his obvious schadenfreude by making his "friend" and reputed moron Carl Pilkington miserable despite having been being sent to visit some wonderful places. It had the effect of annoying me since Pilkington, who isn't quite the idiot Gervais says he is, seems rather to be a nice and decent sort of fellow and deserved better treatment, even if that would undermine the premise of the show.

I don't feel quite the same way about Likable Mike Huckabee, affable and avuncular and sincere though he may seem. It's as hard to feel sympathy for one whose idiocy seems more purposeful and politically founded than genetic, although that may be a factor too. I'm not just talking about his shameless promotion of Bronze age ignorance and mythology and the snickering denigration of science. I'm not just talking about promoting the invasion of Libya and thus cementing the authority of Qaddafi, making us appear imperialistic and escalating the debt and putting a strain on our military capability. I'm talking abut his attempt to enlist a far more scurrilous bit of political mythology than "creation science" to promote his grotesque candidacy by telling us our president grew up in Africa and so really doesn't either understand us or have our interests at heart.

It's not just the racism. I'm used to racism. It's that the possibility of his candidacy rests on building and arming an insurgency of idiots who neither know or care about reality. It's like inviting the Klan to use your back yard for a rally and claiming you're above that sort of thing yourself.

It's not that he's black, you see -- it's just that you can't trust someone with the troubling attribute of being dark skinned. Smiling Mike surely knows that Barack Obama lived in Indonesia as a small boy but wasn't born in and didn't live in any part of Africa. He knows he was born in the USA as surely as Bruce Springsteen was and Mike Huckabee was and grew up in the American Midwest and was raised by his white relatives. So if he does know that and chooses none the less to have you believe otherwise, he's a liar willing to use lies to get elected. If he doesn't know that, he's an idiot to the degree that he shouldn't be given a more responsible or well paid position than a men's room attendant.

Huckabee shouldn't be trusted with leading a Boy Scout troop, much less the United States. He represents, despite his smiling, self-effacing sincerity, the lower skirt of the intellectual as well as the moral decency bell curve, no matter how you measure it.

Yes, professional fixer and HuckPAC Executive Director J. Hogan Gidley says Huckabee "simply misspoke" during his book tour, which is as convincing as saying the dog didn't crap on the carpet, but simply misshit. It only means he's not toilet trained, can't be trusted and we surely don't want him on the expensive rug in the oval office.

Gunboat diplomacy again?

It may seem like old news at a time when this morning's Punch and Judy show is already old by lunchtime, but I've been taking a small vacation from blogging and improving my health by not immediately looking at the news every morning. I'm back, but old news is what I have for breakfast today.

I heard Mr. Huckabee lambaste President Obama last week on MSNBC for not parking the Navy off the coast of Libya so as to intimidate Colonel Qaddafi. Do we need any more evidence for the presidential unsuitability of the avuncular mediocrity who doesn't "believe" in science but thinks it's always better to look tough even when it defeats your purpose?

The mad Colonel has made capital out of standing between Libya and the imperialism of America and what better help could we give him in putting out his message that it's either his leadership or chaos?

I have either to think that Obama bashing is sufficient end in itself for Mike to forget about any possible benefit from a move toward liberal democracy in the Middle East, or that waving the flag is all one needs to do to rally the mob, but in either case the pronouncements of Mike Huckabee are all about the candidacy of Mike Huckabee and everything he says or does is designed to further that end rather than to offer any viable solutions to real problems. Just the kind of Bozo America loves to elect, isn't he?

If this be Treason. . .

The Republicans like to use the word Tyrant a lot. Perhaps it's the same sort of tendency you find in liars and cheats and thieves of other types who use those words to describe those who threaten to expose them. Perhaps not, but I've noticed of late that there have been a lot of calls for summary and extra-legal executions coming from Right wing writers and hate shouters like good ol' love thy neighbor Mike Huckabee or Foxboy Tucker Carlson who "personally" would like to have had Michael Vick put up against a wall and shot even though dear justice loving Tucker professes to be -- you guessed it -- a Christian. Pardon me, but I'm confused.

If you find it hard to reconcile what you think you know about Jesus and non-judgmentalism and forgiveness with summary executions for animal cruelty, perhaps you're unaware of the overriding moral imperative of the Values Party: anything we do to undermine Obama and the Democrats is patriotic and is justified through patriotism because our word is law, not your damned Constitution. Barack Obama praised the NFL's Eagles for giving quarterback Michael Vick a second chance and of course Barack Obama is the Tyrant Prince of Darkness so if he does anything, it's a bad thing. Vick must die, even if those animal rights people are bleeding heart liberals and even if you don't give a damn about dogs.

Last Wednesday in my local paper, I suffered through a tortuous justification of summary execution for treason of the fellow who leaked those diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, the essence of which was that: had he leaked different information under different circumstances at a different time, some terrible thing might have happened. That's the basis of Mike Huckabee's equally loathsome demand for twisting the treason definition to allow the Republicans to kill their critics for the crime of informing the public that our allies aren't our allies and the government doesn't know what it's doing.

Of course if someone were lying about the failures of our government, that would be different. They'd get a regular show on Fox like Huckabee and Beck, make the big bucks and none would dare call it treason. The truth is what makes it bad, you see.

Never mind that something is exposed that would cause us to hang a foreigner the way we did an Nuremberg for, if we do it, it's not a crime. A bit like saying that if your aunt had had wheels instead of legs she'd have been a bus and so she can be sued for not picking you up at the bus stop this morning even if you don't ride the bus and she has legs anyway -- and you'd see the logic of that if you weren't a damned Libtard lover of tyranny.

Pfc. Bradley Manning, the fellow who embarrassed the military with his Afghanistan videos of course should be put up against the same wall for revealing the incompetence of Government, the lies, cover ups and perhaps the slaughter of innocents because after all, anything that doesn't cover up our misdeeds is treason unless the deeds have political importance for Republicans -- then anything is fair game and lawbreakers are heroes and patriots. Are you starting to get it? Criticizing the government is treason because it helps the enemy and there's always an enemy, don't you know -- except when the elite does it, of course, and you know who they are.

Yes, the government is corrupt, incompetent and can't do anything and so we're against it as long as that's actually false. If it's true and you prove it, you're a traitor and should be shot without due process. That's not tyranny -- a middle class tax cut is tyranny, ending insurance company abuse is tyranny, taking deadly contaminated meat off the shelves is tyranny, ending bigotry against law abiding citizens is tyranny, addressing schoolchildren on TV is Tyranny as bad as anything Pol Pot ever did. Making BP pay for their incompetence is tyranny and if you don't agree, the unelected leaders at Fox want you dead and aren't embarrassed to suggest that you be killed. Sic semper tyrannis.

Sarahpalooza!

This took far too long to get right. My apologies.