One of the Fox News in-house presidential candidates, Mike Huckabee, was the guest today with radio Birther Steve Malzberg. In the course of their conversation Huckabee veered off into uncharted territory with a new and ridiculous claim that Barack Obama had grown up in Kenya.
Sure we’ve had Birthers claiming for more than two years now that Obama was born in Kenya, but even those delusional morons never said that he was raised there as well. Huckabee’s journey into Wingnutia was in response to a question from Malzberg about whether he would like to know more about Obama. 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. […] 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.”
Seriously? This is the caliber of the candidates who are being put forth by the Republican Party and their PR agency Fox News. And Huckabee is often held up as one of the more reasonable of the batch.
Let’s stop for a moment and analyze this nonsense. First of all, there is ample evidence that Obama was born in Hawaii, including a birth certificate authenticated by the state. Secondly, there is no evidence to support the contention that Obama has any animosity toward the British. Thirdly, Obama’s father left the family when he was two years old, hardly enough time to influence him on foreign affairs, even if Huckabee’s assertions about Obama’s family were correct. Obama was subsequently raised by his mother and her parents who were from that mysterious, alien locale known as Kansas. So Huckabee’s thesis is riddled with holes and makes no sense whatsoever.
Where on earth would Huckabee get an idea like this? There’s really only one person who could manufacture such a fancy of dementia; only one mind so diseased: Glenn Beck. It was Glenn Beck who first popularized the notion that Obama hated the British because his grandfather (whom he did not know) had been imprisoned in England for his efforts to secure Kenya’s independence from the British crown. Gee, what other country did that? By Beck’s logic every American must also hate the Brits because they fought us in a brutal and deadly war of independence.
The source for Beck’s mythology about Obama and his upbringing was “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” by Dinesh D’Souza. Beck hosted D’Souza on his show last year where they frolicked through the fantasy world of Obama’s aborning rage. But Beck’s psychoanalysis of the President reveals more of Beck’s own psychosis than anything else. On one occasion Beck dedicated a whole program to Obama’s ancestors and how it turned him into a pinko-loving Marxist bent on destroying western civilization.
Now Huckabee is picking up the crazy baton and waving it furiously for attention. Well, he has our attention. Let’s hope he uses it to announce that he will run for president in 2012, because other than a Palin/Steele ticket, I can’t think of anything more entertaining. How about Huckabee/Trump?
[Update:] Huckabee responded to this idiocy through a spokesman exactly as I expected. He said…
“Gov. Huckabee simply misspoke when he alluded to President Obama growing up in Kenya. The governor meant to say the president grew up in Indonesia.”
That is a brazen lie. In his original comments Huckabee said that Obama’s having grown up in Kenya was what shaped his view of the British who once held Kenya as a colony. That would have made no sense at all if he meant to refer to Indonesia. If you swap out Kenya for Indonesia his original statement is gibberish.
There is no way he “simply misspoke” unless he thinks the Mau Mau Revolution was an Indonesian affair and that Obama’s Kenyan grandfather was persecuted by the British for something to do with Indonesia. It’s absurd, and it’s an obvious lie.
That’s funny because Fox never had that reaction to the hundreds of Tea Party protesters who exhibited similar tendencies toward violence and hate. They never featured Tea Baggers with signs associating Obama with Hitler. They never headlined messages that read “We Came Unarmed – This Time.” Some signs, like the one portraying Obama as an African witch doctor, were mass produced and popped up at Tea Parties across the country. But Fox never paid much attention to any of that.
I have been writing about the cerebral rot virus that is Glenn Beck for quite a while. And in all of that time I have striven to note that, as bad as Beck is, he is but a parasitic wart on the butt of the rightist media. Almost two years ago I wrote an article that showed how 
Yet his disciples continue to have faith in his vacant pronouncements. They follow blindly, convinced of his infallibility. How many times does he have to get it wrong before people will throw up their hands and stumble off to find another Snake Oil peddler? Is their faith in St. Beck so powerful that he could tell them that Obama is the Anti-Christ and they would buy it? To be fair, Beck hasn’t made that allegation yet. He merely hosted the author of 
Is there a more incompetent news network on the air than Fox News? This is an operation that has screwed up so often that the management had to issue a memo warning employees to stop screwing up. Apparently it didn’t do much good because the “errors” are still rampant.
In rebuttal Kilmeade referenced a poll in USA Today that showed that 61% of respondents favored legislation that would strip unions of their collective bargaining rights. He also presented the graphic to the left to illustrate his point.