The race to become the Republican presidential race's top sociopath continues apace, this time with ex-governor and radio shock jock Mike Huckabee declaring that by negotiating a non-proliferation agreement with Iran instead of just [something something something] Obama "
would take the Israelis and basically march them to the door of the oven." Even the Fox News brigade tried to get him to walk that back: nothing doing. "
I know what the oven door looks like," he opined.
So this morning he took to the Today Show to claim that the Jewish people he knows are all quite pleased with his remarks comparing Obama to enablers of the Holocaust, so he's got nothing to apologize for.
"The response from Jewish people have been overwhelming positive," he said, adding that he has even heard from Holocaust survivors and their children. He noted that at an event he attended Monday night, "I was probably one of four gentiles in the entire event — it was a Jewish event. People were overwhelmingly supportive."
While it's certainly possible to imagine that the sort of people who would willingly hang out with Mike Huckabee would indeed like the things uncontrollably streaming from Mike Huckabee's mouth, there have been polls of the Iran nonproliferation deal.
Forty-eight percent of Jewish Americans support the deal, while only 28 percent oppose. That's a twenty point spread. It also suggests, perhaps surprisingly, that American Jews can think for their own damn selves about these things and do not particularly need yet another hard-right evangelical radio minister and his frequent bouts of word-diarrhea to act as their generous thought benefactor.
Huckabee, for his part, is unswayed. He sniffled yesterday that he was just following the Iranian government's lead in comparing things to the Holocaust. Which would indeed be good rhetoric to mimic, if Mike Huckabee was running to lead a sketchily rational theocratic Middle Eastern regime bent on saying belligerent things for attention. Instead, though, he is running to be president of the United States. I wonder if he understands the difference.