Let's give Mike Huckabee a little credit: he's not completely clueless. So when he says something completely repulsive and offensive to decent people, one must begin with the assumption that it wasn't just a colossal gaffe.
The very fact that Huckabee's campaign went to all this trouble to make a graphic shows that Huckabee intended his flagrant disregard for common decency to be spread far and wide.
I commented the following last night:
Huckabee absolutely knows what he's doing. (3+ / 0-)
He looks at Trump and how he's sucking all the oxygen out of the room by saying all kinds of outlandish shit.
The only way he can get attention in the cast of thousands that is the Republican primary is to say something equally outrageous.
There are hundreds or possibly thousands of Republican candidates for president, and none of them can get in a word edgewise because the news is all Trump all the time. But for Huckabee, it was easy to predict that the media would more than happy to oblige his desire to draw attention to himself by repeating his assertion on loop. Everyone knows how much the media enjoys discussing the "controversial comments"
du jour. Trump is out of the news for at least one day, and now we're talking about Huckabee. Meanwhile, the other Republican candidates still aren't given the time of day. Mission accomplished.
Shamelessly using the holocaust to score cheap media coverage is bad enough on its own, but the implication that the American president, Barack Obama, is the next Adolf Hitler adds layers of sleaze. This fact was not lost on the unnamed subject of the attack, President Barack Obama himself, at a press conference with the Ethiopian prime minister.
First, the president calls out the inflammatory rhetoric coming from elected representatives the Republican Party. This isn't some "both sides" false equivalence.
The particular comments of Mr. Huckabee are part of a general pattern that we've seen that would be considered ridiculous if it weren't so sad. We've had a sitting senator call John Kerry Pontius Pilate. We've had a sitting senator who also happens to be running for president suggest that I'm a leading state sponsor of terrorism. These are leaders of the Republican Party.
The president didn't stop there. He was an excellent candidate for president a couple of times in a former life and knows a thing or two about media cycles and winning elections.
When you get rhetoric like this, maybe it gets attention and maybe this is an effort to push Mr. Trump out of the headlines, but it's not the kind of leadership that's needed for America right now.
Nailed it. That is exactly what it is. It is a cry for attention to push Trump aside for a moment. If there is nobody else in the country that sees through Huckabee's gambit, I'm totally okay with the president being the only one who understands.
Oh, but the president wasn't finished with Trump and the Republicans. He calls out their hypocrisy and selective outrage.
What's been interesting when you look at what's happened with Mr. Trump, when he's made some of the remarks that, for example, challenged the heroism of Mr. McCain, someone who endured torture and conducted himself with exemplary patriotism, the Republicans are shocked, and yet that arises out of a culture where those kinds of outrageous attacks have become far too commonplace and get circulated nonstop through the Internet, talk radio, and news outlets. And I recognize when outrageous statements like that are made about me that a lot of the same people who were outraged about Mr. McCain were pretty quiet.
The president gets it. He knows all too well the lengths Republicans will go to in order to achieve their political gains. It remains to be seen, however, if this race to the bottom will continue. How many other candidates will offend huge chunks of the world to get noticed? I heard somewhere that a Republican debate is coming up...
Video below, h/t Tommy Christopher.