Huckabee should forget the presidency

Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and 2008 Republican presidential candidate, has been having quite a week. Not necessarily a good week, mind you, but it has garnered a lot of media attention. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the man currently leading the field of potential 2012 GOP candidates.

It started Monday with an interview in which he answered the question, “”Don’t you think we deserve to know more about this man [Obama]?”:

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, very different than the average American. When he gave the bust back to the Brits, the bust of Winston Churchill, a great insult to the British. But then 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.

He later explained, rather implausibly, that he meant to say “Indonesia,” not “Kenya.”

Then yesterday, as if trying to keep himself in the headlines, Huckabee said in another interview:

I have said many times, publicly, that I do think he has a different world view, and I think it’s in part molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to boy scout meetings, and you know, our communities were filled with rotary clubs, not madrassas. And I just do think that there is — again, I am not saying he’s not a citizen, I’ve never said that, I’ve said the opposite. I’ve never said he’s a Muslim

What a narrow-minded, bigoted man he is, trying to appeal to the most extreme right-wing members of his party — the birthers, the racists, the xenophobes. And he’s using lies and innuendo to do it. Obama was born in Hawaii and, except for four years in Indonesia (from age 6 to 10), grew up there. He is not a Muslim and never attended an Islamic madrassa.

Huckabee’s statements were not mistakes or slips of the tongue. He knew exactly what he was saying. Shameful that a man of the cloth would stoop to such tactics. Unless, of course, he actually believes all that garbage…

Give it up, Huck. You were a loser in 2008 — and you still are.