Mike Huckabee on Fox News Sunday, February 27, 2011
Andrew Sullivan on the utterly insincere claim by Team Huckabee that their guy "misspoke" yesterday when he falsely stated President Obama grew up in Kenya:
Here's [Huckabee's] original quote:
"One thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American ... 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 are a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather."
Well, how do you get a view of the Mau Mau revolution in Indonesia? So I don't buy the mis-spoke explanation. And Obama did not "grow up with" a Kenyan father and grandfather. Seriously, how can you have any understanding of Obama without knowing he yearned for his absent father and was brought up largely by his white mom and white grandparents?
Sullivan also noted the most damning aspect of Huckabee's birtherism: that "the only" reason he is "not confident" that there is proof Barack Obama was born overseas is that the Clintons couldn't find any hard evidence. As Meteor Blades wrote yesterday, this allowed Huckabee's interviewer to suggest that the Clintons were concealing the truth about Obama's true birth status, a suggestion Huckabee did not dispute.
Clever Mike didn't make the mistake of actually challenging the authenticity of Barack Obama's birth certificate. He simply let Malzberg handle that with innuendos that the Clintons' oppositional research team probably found something fishy about it but made a deal with Obama not to say anything as long as his team said nothing about some allegedly nefarious thing in Hillary Clinton's background.
... What he means is what many politicians — and a multitude of radio hosts — mean: Obama is other, not really an American, and he has no right to the Presidency. It's a reprehensible point of view no matter who expresses it. But Huckabee is one of the GOP's golden boys.
Amen. Mike Huckabee's squishy birtherism leaves us with just two options: either he actually believes that President Obama was born overseas but doesn't think it can be proven, or he's perfectly happy to cynically peddle false conspiracy theories to his lunatic base. I'd bet on the latter, but whichever it is, when you combine it with his recent round of gay-bashing (here and here), you're reminded that no matter how nice he might seem on TV, he is, at heart, nothing more than Rick Santorum with charisma.