Mike Huckabee's Mau Mau fantasies

Why don't right-wingers look at Obama's mother to understand his politics? Oh yeah -- she was white!

By Joan Walsh
Salon.com

Mike Huckabee's been trying out for the role of the reasonable, avuncular GOP wingnut, in advance of a likely 2012 presidential run. When mean-girls Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann savaged Michelle Obama's healthy-eating campaign last month, the cuddly, Smurfy Huckabee, who's publicly struggled with a weight problem, defended the first lady. Even in his outrageous interview with right-wing-radio knuckle-dragger Steve Malzberg, Huckabee probably thought he was being a voice of comparative reason, quelling birther madness by saying that if President Obama truly wasn't born in the U.S., those vicious Clintons would have run him out of the 2008 race (and maybe into an early grave with Vince Foster) -- so he thinks the president was probably born here.

It was Huckabee's foray into Obama's alleged childhood in Kenya -- of course he never visited Kenya as a child, though he spent four years in Indonesia -- that got him in some trouble for the Malzberg conversation. Some trouble, but not much; in fact, two journalists I respect, Dave Weigel and Ben Smith, have actually tried to defend Huckabee's distorting Obama's childhood history, arguing that the friendly Republican was actually fighting birtherism and trying to get at some actual truth about the president's personal and political background, even if he got his facts wrong.

In case you missed it, Huckabee went off the rails when he tried to indulge the spirit of birtherism -- that the president isn't American, in fact he's anti-American -- by agreeing when host Malzberg asked: "Don't you think we deserve to know more about this man?" Huckabee answered:

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 back 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.

(More here.)

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