Does Huckabee think that nobody can remember what he said even yesterday? Does he really think that his audience is THAT addled?

What about Huckabee’s own support for boycotts, as we discussed here only ONE MONTH AGO? How about how Huckabee boycotted NPR because he was angry that Juan Williams had been let go for bigoted comments about Muslims? How about all the various boycotts and similar tactics taken by the right wingers at Fox News that Huckabee never discusses?

This sounds like a case of “Who do you believe? Me or Your Lying Eyes?”

The point with these guys is that they’re trying to cloak their bigotry behind their religion. If every Christian believed what these guys do, then they might have a basis for their actions. But that isn’t the case by a long shot.

I agree with Ehrlich that these guys are really just self-promoters trying to get attention and celebrity, while hiding behind what they say are religious principles. They have espoused hatred toward others, which should go against their Christian learnings, but they’re carefully avoiding having that discussion. And now they have people like Dana Loesch lining up to attack anyone who appropriately criticizes them for their behavior.

Frankly, Hannity and Hayes had no answers for the facts that Davis presented them, and Hannity decided to try to bully Davis off the screen, which backfired.

This is all “asked and answered” nonsense. My favorite part is the implication that this somehow turned the election in 2012. As though nobody was discussing this very issue on Fox News and in multiple debates in front of the public. If this was the “masterstroke” of the Obama Campaign in 2012, then how do they explain that the Obama Campaign was openly discussing this matter over the two months leading up to the election. Fox News’ take on this assumes that somehow the whole issue was hidden from the public and that’s blatantly false. Which means that Fox News actually thinks that its viewers can’t even remember what happened less than two years ago, let alone longer. Do they really believe that everyone’s memory is that short-term?

I’ve been fascinated to see Fox News falling over themselves trying to justify Rove’s behavior here.

On the one hand, you have some commentators criticizing Rove’s “strategy”, saying that it exposes a real issue but perhaps may also change the debate away from all the other “scandals” the right would prefer to foment.

On the other hand, you have some commentators like Hannity and Bolling who are openly applauding Rove. Bolling went so far as to call him a “genius” and “brilliant” for this incredible approach.

Never mind the fact that Rove’s comments were way off base – she wasn’t in the hospital for “30 days”, she wore glasses consistent with what people wear for a few days after a concussion, and of course, she was accused of having faked the whole thing at the time to avoid testifying about Benghazi.

Even if you take out the whole issue of Rove’s fact inadequacy, that still leaves the simple question of why he would do it. Why would Rove make this kind of statement, much less double down on it when challenged?

The simple answer was out of anger and mean-spiritedness. Rove has never been a friend of the Clintons, and he just couldn’t resist taking a cheap shot when the opportunity presented itself. He can explain it all he wants in the most reasoned tones, but there’s no careful thinking behind this. He did it because he dislikes Hillary Clinton and he resents the fact that she may well become President in his lifetime. All the rest is just dancing around the truth.

The Laura Ingraham spot was particularly vicious, even for Ingraham. Crowley’s contribution was fairly noxious as well.

First Ingraham tries to get in the dig about this somehow being sexual harassment rather than an affair.

Crowley’s contribution was nasty from the start. I appreciate Ellen noting that Crowley instantly wanted to get into the Willey material, even knowing that the woman has no credibility. For Crowley, it gave her a quick cheap shot right out of the gate. As usual for her, Crowley warmed into her subject and began throwing bombs at both Hillary and Bill Clinton, portraying them as careerists. She even got in a cheap shot at Jessica Ehrlich, saying that somehow the Democrats were always defending bad men like Clinton and Teddy Kennedy (natch – she got the Kennedy shot in too).

I find it interesting that Ingraham wanted to work in a discussion of Juanita Broaddrick, a person who repeatedly changed her story and whose credibility has been questioned everywhere but on the far right and the far left. People who really hate the Clintons tend to believe her, since her story portrays Bill Clinton as a monster and Hillary as an enabler. Ingraham of course had to play Broaddrick’s story as somehow credible, with “corroborating evidence”, even though that’s not actually the case.

I also find it interesting that while Ehrlich was discussing Clinton, the Fox News gang ran clips of Hillary designed to make her look goofy or foolish.

Ingraham also threw cheap shots in essentially accusing feminists of somehow not caring whether Bill Clinton attacked women – something that actual feminists could school Ingraham about if she ever dared to have one on a show with her. It’s telling that Crowley couldn’t resist a smug grin when hearing Ingraham do this. The tone of Ingraham’s “questions” was fairly insulting not only to Ehrlich but to women in general.

And throughout the whole segment, we’re meant to believe that Laura Ingraham really wants to stand up for women’s rights, when she has spent decades opposing and ridiculing women who have made different life choices than she has.

Looking at this segment, I think that Ehrlich was trying to stay on point and not get distracted into the weeds by the various nasty comments that Ingraham and Crowley were saying. But I would have preferred to hear her say to each of them: “I reject the premise of your statements. You’re presenting questionable opinions as facts and you’re repeatedly interrupting me. Don’t you think that’s an ironic position, given that you’re trying to distract attention from the very real opposition the GOP and the right wing have presented to real women and their rights?”

Bemused, thank you for the kind words.

Tom, it took me all of five minutes to do a Google search on the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the “longwarjournal” blog that they post online. Thomas Joscelyn and Bill Roggio are the guys who are at the top of both ideas. The FDD has been roundly criticized for trying to push military solutions at all possible junctures, and for pushing inaccurate information – such as Roggio saying that terrorists known to have been killed in drone strikes were actually somehow alive.

As for the interview with Tommy Vietor, I’m assuming you mean the attempted “gotcha!” by Bret Baer, wherein Vietor was asked to go back through the whole play-by-play of questions that have been asked and answered. He very clearly told Baer that the Rhodes email is a standard campaign email, one that should be recognizable to any political reporter, and that it’s clear that Rhodes is referring to the regionwide protests in the one bit of language that Fox News has sadly chosen to emphasize. When Baer tried to bait Vietor with the bit about “Where was the president if he wasn’t in the Situation Room?”, Vietor responded that he honestly didn’t know what room in the White House the President was in at every minute. He also responded that asking minutiae about this stuff was difficult to respond to, given that we’re talking about things that happened two years ago. Fox News of course decided to focus just on the line “Dude, that was two years ago.” To my mind, Fox News and Bret Baer owe Vietor a humble apology.

BTW it’s begun to occur to me that the GOP must have another reason to run around yelling “Benghazi! Benghazi!” again. Could it be that they’re seeing polling numbers they don’t like, and that perhaps they’re trying to rally their base for the midterms?

What you’re hearing in all these different shows is a consistent drumbeat of Roger Ailes’ “Line of the Day”. He’s clearly hoping that he can smear both President Obama and Hillary Clinton with Take 17 1/2 of the same nonsensical “questions about Benghazi”. Here we go again with the same speculations about what dark intentions Obama and Clinton must have had in fall 2012, etc, etc. And it’s not like we haven’t had, say, 17 1/2 prior times to refute all this stuff. It’s as though Ailes thinks the American public will simply forget the last group of answers if they’ve been out of the headlines for the past two weeks.

The other part of it, which has now been voiced on pretty much every Fox News program, is Ailes’ caution to GOP candidates: Every pundit and anchor is “just asking” the question of whether it’s a good idea for the GOP to focus on Benghazi again when they could be discussing “the economy and jobs”. Or maybe that’s just a coincidence…

The reality is that if the GOP were to focus on the actual economic issues, they’d have to explain why they refused to extend unemployment benefits, why they voted against an increase in the minimum wage, why they have repeatedly done whatever they could to gum up the works, why GOP governors have tried to cripple the ACA by refusing to join the exchanges, etc. (And that last will be rectified as various GOP governors get voted out and Dems get in, such as in Florida. With each of those cases, you’ll see another flood of exchanges opening and people getting coverage. And with each further state where this happens, the GOP dream of somehow instantaneously repealing the ACA becomes more and more of a figment.)

The Fox News reaction to the Correspondents’ Dinner reads as what it really is – a tantrum over the fact that they hate the fact that President Obama is indeed the President. All the rest is just dressing.

Ellen, I do hope that you’ll be able to put together a mash-up video sometime of all the Hannity freakouts we’ve seen on this kind of thing.

Specifically, how many times have Sean Hannity and Jay Sekulow been caught on camera openly musing about the impeachment to come, or the impending doom hanging over the Obama Administration over this or that non-scandal? I’m willing to bet you could already fill at least five minutes with this stuff – none of which has proven to be anything by Hannity and Sekulow’s hot air.

I’ll give Davis points for trying to stand part of his ground and forcing Hannity to allow him to finish his statement, but Sekulow still tried to cut him off and also tried to see if he could distract Davis from his point by shouting nonsense at him. I agree with you that Davis should have opened with “I reject the entire premise of your opening, and I ask you how you would have reacted to someone making comments like that about the George W. Bush presidency.” At the same time, Davis appeared to be focused on a single point – that the Benghazi language in the memo is directly pasted from CIA talking points – and I think he felt he should stay on that single point or he wouldn’t get anywhere.

reese, I agree with you that right wingers definitely feel that Jimmy Carter eroded the prestige of the presidency. Not everyone does, however. As I pointed out, the whole issue of his election was that he WASN’T corrupt, which was exactly the stigma of the Nixon Administration and then Ford for pardoning Nixon.

As for Reagan, he was certainly popular during his first years in office, but there was a LOT of opposition to him both abroad and at home. He was viewed as dangerously misguided, particularly when he blew up the Gorbachev summit so he could keep going with the Star Wars idea. And in his second term, the sheer weight of all the scandals led to him finishing office in a situation where he was dangerously close to being impeached himself. The only thing that saved him from that fate, frankly, was the circus of congressional testimony and then a deliberate closing of the ranks around him by his inner circle. So Ollie North was convicted, but he was willing to take the hit for the man above him. Same idea as what happened almost 20 years later with Scooter Libby over the misdeeds of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. Looking at Reagan today, the right wing loves him and his legacy. Americans who either weren’t alive or aware when he was president think of him as a nice, folksy guy. Everyone else looks at his legacy and shakes their head.

As for the reason why Single Payer didn’t go through, you must know that the GOP in Congress gummed that one up. Frankly, the Dems didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to take on the insurance companies in that way, so they settled for the much weaker “Public Option”. Except that the GOP made so much kerfuffle over it that President Obama made a show of dropping it – to placate the GOP. The GOP responded as they have to every one of Obama’s offerings – they said they wanted the entire bill to go back to the drawing board, as a method of killing it, just like they had done when Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton had tried this in the mid-90s. Not sure what you mean about payoffs for Nancy Pelosi, but we do know that the Dems had to practically beg many of their own members to vote for the ACA since the GOP was in lockstep trying to kill it. (It’s an interesting irony – the GOP likes to project that “the left” is monolithic when in fact that statement really tends to apply to the right wing. Liberals tend to waffle back and forth, and those farther on the left are wildly divided even among themselves.) The Dems have always been a mix of liberal politicians and more conservative ones. It’s no surprise that Nancy Pelosi had to make promises to the more conservative ones in order to get their votes on this bill. But that’s not the same thing as all the graft that went on under Ronald Reagan, which I’m sure you know. Nancy Pelosi promising a House member she’d help him get funding passed for a project he wanted in his state is a bit different from the numbers of Reagan and George W. Bush Administration members taking money directly from major companies or immediately getting cushy positions there after jumping out of their government jobs. That’s a payoff, and there’s a big, big difference.

Tom is not seeing that the point about Sterling’s party affiliation is that it’s irrelevant, and Fox News got it completely wrong in their attempt to throw mud. He’s a right wing guy and he gives money to right wing politicians, whether they are GOP or Democrat. He votes GOP. Fox News and Limbaugh thought they had a “gotcha!” moment when they found that he had donated to Dem campaigns. But they didn’t take the minute to do the research and see that he was actually a GOP voter. Just shows that they weren’t interested in the actual facts – only how they could try to use this situation for a quick smear job.

Tom is also saying some very odd things for a Democrat who works in education. Among other things, his assertions about income inequality aren’t researched and sound like they’re being echoed from right wing websites. Further, the whole paragraph about these issues is loaded with spelling and grammatical errors that make it extremely difficult to read or understand.

I’m sure there are plenty of Democrats who have issues with President Obama, but what I’m trying to decipher from Tom’s remarks makes very little sense. He seems to want President Obama to walk a picket line about the ACA. Why? He seems to be upset that the ACA has had hiccups in starting up, as any government program has. (And I’d argue that things would have gone a lot smoother had President Obama and the Dems kept the public option, but that’s an argument from four years ago. We’ll get Single Payer, but it will be another few years before the country can accept it.) He seems upset about jobs being outsourced overseas – I agree that this is a problem. I don’t know that President Obama himself can do anything about companies choosing to do that. I know that he has repeatedly urged US companies to keep their work here in the US and to hire US workers. If those companies are repeatedly choosing to lay off their US workers and run offshore, I don’t know how this is President Obama’s fault. He certainly isn’t encouraging them to do so, as was the case with George W. Bush’s cabinet.

Regarding Tom’s issue about undocumented workers and unscrupulous contractors, that’s a local issue that can be addressed by whatever state the contractor works. If someone is deliberately breaking the law to underbid another man’s contract, that can be dealt with at the local level. Not sure how this is a Presidential issue that needs to be fixed from the White House – we already have laws on the books to cover this.

Tom’s final paragraph indicates that he seems to enjoy the more conservative programs President Obama has maintained during his administration. I’m not sure what his point is with “I think it’s great that he can take out american terrorist with drones”. Besides the obvious syntax error, I have no idea what he means here. I’m also not certain what he means by saying that President Obama has somehow “donated billions of dollars” to “jack up the rates” of coal plants. This assertion is both incoherent and bizarre. He mentions a right wing meme about President Obama giving some appointments to people who supported his campaigns, but forgets to mention that all presidents do this – particularly George W. Bush just a few short years ago. He makes a bizarre statement about written tests being given to police and firefighters and then goes on to talk about the TSA and how he wants low income families to own their own homes. Frankly, I’m completely puzzled by his entire response. Of course, that assumes that he was being serious with these statements.

I think O’Reilly was simply trying to find a way out for several of the Fox News personalities who have expressed allegiance with Bundy but didn’t jump all the way into the pool with him. I don’t think this idea works at all, and Bundy is absolutely not a victim. (I suppose you could say he’s a victim of his own ignorance and racism, but that’s a whole different argument.)

The more interesting part of O’Reilly’s Talking Points tonight was that I believe he completely pilloried Sean Hannity, possibly even worse than Colbert and Jon Stewart. O’Reilly’s recounting of the horrors of slavery, stacked next to his discussion that “not everybody” at Fox News was making Bundy their pal, sounds like a pretty direct shot across the bow at Hannity. Given that the men have no love lost between them, I’m sure this will make for some wonderfully frosty times at the building in New York.

This was one of the most spectacular Jon Stewart takedowns of all time. I almost felt sorry for Hannity by the end, particularly when we got to the Whiskey Rebellion. But Hannity should know the old saying “Mess with the bull, you get the horns…”

Great to know.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Bill O’Reilly is running a defensive action for Fox News and right wing pundits who have taken every opportunity to attack President Obama and Eric Holder in every manner possible. The current air of outraged moral pretension is in response to Holder’s comments last week, first in properly scolding Louie Gohmert for his tantrum and then at Sharpton’s group where he accurately recounted the deliberate roadblocking being done to him and to President Obama. Somehow, Fox News expects people to believe that President Obama and Holder are being crybabies over their treatment by the GOP and their acolytes.

Let’s be very, very clear as to what has been going on over the past 7 years, and it does go back that far when it comes to this President. From the moment that Barack Obama announced his candidacy, the right wing went on the attack. He was met with every cowpie possible, all the way through his campaign and into the presidency. During the campaign, you had Rush Limbaugh trying to spread havoc by telling his listeners to register as Democrats to foul up both Obama and Hillary Clinton’s candidacies. You had Hillary Clinton being nasty enough to set up the nonsensical birth certificate narrative. You had right wing pundit after right wing pundit all predicting that Barack Obama had NO CHANCE to win the presidency, since white voters would never pull the lever for him no matter what they said to pollsters. You had all the right wing media confidently predicting a John McCain victory, even in the face of what was obviously massive support for Obama.

Then President Obama actually gets elected. And before he can even take office, Rush Limbaugh throws down the right wing gauntlet and screams “I hope he fails!” to rile up the right wing base. GOP leaders and pundits gather around the time of Obama’s first inauguration to map out a strategy of complete obstinance, declaring that no GOP congresspeople will be voting for anything Obama proposes. True to their word, the GOP in Congress refuse to cooperate, so the Democrats are forced to scramble, even with a majority, to get anything done. President Obama repeatedly tries to offer compromises, including sacrificing what should have been the centerpiece of his attempt at health care reform, the public option. And each time he offers a compromise, the GOP responds that it’s not good enough, and they want MORE. Each time he gets anything through the congress, the right wing publicly makes dark statements about how he’ll rue the day he took this or that action.

I wouldn’t say that all of the opposition from the GOP is racially driven. Some of it certainly is. Some of it is just the absolute position of Limbaugh fans that only the farthest right wing candidates are worth supporting. Some of it is a personal resentment toward Obama and his cabinet for having the temerity to be elected and then try to actually get anything done. But when you have groups in the country openly stating that the President doesn’t have a right to hold his office because they believe his birth certificate is forged, and when many of those groups repeatedly try to spread canards about his religion or his personal life, all based on his ethnicity, it all starts to get a bad taste about it. When you have tea party groups openly making nasty and racist statements about the President, it’s hard to avoid the message they’re sending: “Why is this black man President when we wanted our white candidate?”

Since the GOP was able to ride a wave of anger and frankly hatred in 2010 to a majority in the House, they’ve increased the level of their intransigence. Only now, since they have committee chairmanships, they can also assemble bizarre inquiries such as those led by Darrell Issa, a man who has spent his career chasing any ambulance he could in the public square.

It’s clear that the GOP leadership and the pundits had a specific agenda with this Presidency – to try to smear it as much as possible with allegations of corruption and scandal. Hence we get nonsense about how Holder’s DOJ isn’t pursuing a case against some Black Panther idiots, ignoring the fact that the case wasn’t being followed by the Bush DOJ either. We get a conspiracy theory about the ATF “Fast & Furious” program, an idea that had been enthusiastically followed by agents until the Obama appointees took over, at which point some of the agents suddenly had a problem with EVERYTHING. (There’s a great story in Fortune magazine from two years ago that shows the whole F&F problem was actually a personnel dispute inside ATF, not a whistleblower situation at all.) We get conspiracy theories about IRS clerks in Ohio who divided up their piles of tax exemption requests in a manner that the right wing thinks was mean. (And just yesterday, the right wing tries to imply that they have incriminating emails, when those emails actually just show the IRS and the DOJ acting normally.) We get the spectacle of the right wing jumping on a left wing conspiracy theory about the NSA. And with each of these wild goose chases, we get another episode of the “Darrell Issa, Investigative Congressman” soap opera, in which Issa throws tantrums in public about how nobody is cooperating with his small document requests – requests that are actually massive fishing expeditions into what could be millions of pages of documents, many of which full of confidential and personal information that Issa has no business seeing.

The real reason behind the “scandal of the week” approach they’ve been taking is that the right wing is still angry about the attention given to the scandals that engulfed the Nixon, Reagan and W. Bush presidencies. They’re still angry that they got busted with Nixon for the Watergate break-in and the subsequent cover-up. They’re still angry that Reagan’s people got busted for Iran/Contra among many other scandals including graft and influence peddling. As I understand it, Reagan’s administration actually topped the record for indictments and convictions of its membership previously held by Warren G. Harding’s venal operation from nearly 100 years ago. More than the first two insults, they’re really angry that the Bush people got nailed for their behavior. They’re angry that Alberto Gonzalez was forced to resign in disgrace after his improper behavior. They’re angry that Scooter Libby got busted and took a fall for both Rove and Cheney when the Bush people took revenge on a wayward diplomat who’d contradicted them in public. So their response is to try to smear the current administration with all of these faux “scandals”. Their hope is to establish a historical narrative where even if the W. Bush presidency is known for its failures and scandals, the right wing can then immediately bring up all these ready-to-order microwaveable treats about the Obama presidency.

What you’re seeing is the creation of a false narrative – specifically designed to create an alternate version of current history. Within the right wing echo chamber, you’ll hear talking points coming up on right wing radio or at Fox News, and within a day those talking points will spread across the right wing punditocracy. Repeat that three or four times, and you’ve got a consistent story that’s been told in multiple outlets, even if it has almost nothing to do with facts or truth. Keep repeating that story a year or two later when most people don’t remember the details, and you can actually have a chapter in a history book where the reader doesn’t realize that the pages are not accurate. To my mind, this is the real purpose of Fox News in the first place. As I’ve said before, the existence of websites like this one is crucial to defeating this false narrative before it can take hold anywhere. So that when these guys put out a completely biased account of, say, how the Obama Administration dealt with a bust of Churchill, someone can immediately challenge them with the actual facts of what happened.

Given the level of personal animosity and anger the right wing has shown toward President Obama and his entire administration, it’s no surprise that they were doubly infuriated by his re-election, another event Fox News went out of its way to insist would not happen. They actually spent no less than TWO YEARS doing this. We saw Bill O’Reilly confidently predict that Obama had very little chance of being re-elected given the economic numbers. We saw Sean Hannity start every broadcast for over a year with the snarl of “We are On the Road to 2012!” as a battle cry to try to get the GOP base excited about their candidates. We saw multiple on-air pundits confidently predict that Obama would lose to Mitt Romney in a landslide. Even some of the outlets that have prided themselves on accuracy, like Gallup, fell into this trap. Scott Rasmussen’s GOP-leaning polling group even took the position of leaving their thumb on the scale all the way up to Election Day. (In years prior, he would always take the thumb off at the last minute, thus establishing his “record of accuracy”, provided you only counted the final couple of days before the election in question.) As has been recounted, this was all due to the right wing simply not being able to conceive of a world in which Barack Obama could be re-elected. All the way to the last second, even Mitt Romney was convinced he was going to win, even in the face of polling data that consistently showed that not to be the case.

We shouldn’t forget that the right wing also employed Doug Schoen and Pat Cadell at Fox News to publicly muse about the Dems not even running Obama for re-election. We shouldn’t forget that the pundits on Fox News would regularly do things like refer to Obama as “President Crybaby” or as “a pathetic little man”. We shouldn’t forget that the Fox News pundits all predicted Eric Holder would either be forced to resign or be impeached on multiple occasions. It doesn’t seem to have worked – he’s still there. I would argue that his continued presence is a reaction to the constant drumbeat of attacks from the GOP. Had they not repeatedly challenged him, including a ridiculous contempt vote over one of Issa’s tantrums, I think it likely that he would have stepped down for Obama’s second term. But with them constantly calling for his head over every nonsensical thing they could find? There’s no way he was going to give them that satisfaction.

So yes, there is a racial component to what the right wing has been doing here regarding Obama and Holder, and there is also a personal and political component. It’s all intertwined. But Eric Holder is correct to call them out on their behavior. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh can cry foul all they want, but if they acted in a less obstinant manner, they wouldn’t be getting called out in the first place. And they don’t get to rewrite history to whitewash their own actions.

Jane’s comment is extremely odd.

As we already know, this was not a “land grab” but instead a situation where a local rancher was flaunting his defiance of US law for 20 years. He was politely asked to stop this behavior for years before they finally decided to take action. And once they did, every wingnut around decided this was some kind of attack on personal liberty.

It’s interesting the levels to which the wingnuts have been trying to push this story, including the falsehood that motivated this thread – the notion that the BHL would slaughter someone’s cattle and secretly bury them. It’s no wonder that Harry Reid has correctly labeled these people as domestic terrorists – I’m not certain how else you describe a group of armed vigilantes threatening BHL agents in the name of someone openly breaking the law for decades.

Jane is correct that we are a nation of laws, but she forgets that she doesn’t get to choose which ones we need to obey. She’s incorrect about laws about the border – the officers are not obligated under law to take certain actions, and they can be asked by higher-ups to prioritize their enforcement. That’s one thing. A rancher openly trespassing for 20 years is entirely different. Neither she nor a band of armed vigilantes can change those faccts.

I completely agree that at some point, Hannity’s shenanigans are going to get someone badly injured or worse. It will likely be someone who has really bought into Hannity’s line of the day, and Hannity will then refuse to take any responsibility for his conduct.

At the same time, I did notice that Rush Limbaugh took a moment to cover the Kansas killer – to play up the idea of the guy being a Democrat. Some things never change.

Kelly’s hands aren’t totally clean here. She also had Dana Loesch on the air to foment the idea that the Feds were somehow killing Bundy’s cattle!

Huckabee’s been on a heck of a roll over the past week, racking up a series of hypocritical statements and even outright lies.

His comments about his homophobia are of course based on the resignation of Brendan Eich from Mozilla after his active support (including financial support) of California Proposition 8 in 2008 was exposed. Huckabee wants to find an excuse for Eich’s behavior, so he trots out the right wing trope that ‘Well, Barack Obama agreed with the reasoning of this proposition in 2008, so why doesn’t the left make him resign?". Which is a ridiculous comparison on its face.

Let’s remember the actual history of Proposition 8, and not just the version that the right wing pundits would have their gullible listeners believe. This actually dates back to California’s Proposition 22, which passed by about 65% of the vote in the year 2000. Prop 22 was designed as a parallel to the hateful “Defense of Marriage” act that went through Newt Gingrich’s House in 1996. The purpose of it was to block same-sex marriages from being recognized, specifically in California. Before Prop 22, same-sex couples would try to marry outside California and then use a clause in state family law to have California recognize the marriage as legal inside the state. Anti-gay groups rallied against this idea, supporting both the federal legislation and state initiatives like 22, which were designed to say NO to gay couples. It’s a sign of how things have changed since then that the polling in 2000 indicated that the proposition would narrowly pass, but when the final vote was held, the numbers were much higher for its passage. Which tells us many people didn’t want to publicly say “I support this”, but in the ballot booth, they did just that. For several years, the anti-gay population crowed over this victory, using it to block same-sex couples from having many of the same rights as heterosexual couples. As had been the case in the past, homophobic parents would bar the partner of their son or daughter from their hospital rooms, and would legally deny that there was any official relationship between the partners. This got particularly nasty when one partner would be on their deathbed and the other partner would be forbidden to see them.

In 2008, the California Supreme Court finally overturned Prop 22, among other homophobic pieces of legislation. The anti-gay forces knew this was coming, so they had mobilized to create Proposition 8, built from the same language but designed to circumvent the legal challenges that killed 22. Unlike the year 2000, the campaign in 2008 was much more evenly fought. This time, the opponents of the proposition were even able to out-fundraise the anti-gay forces by about 5 million dollars. (The Prop 8 supporters raised about 39 million, including from Brendan Eich, and the opponents raised about 44 million.) Polling indicated the populace was pretty evenly split, and this time, the final vote was much closer. Prop 8 did pass, but on a much, much narrower basis – at 52 percent. Which tells us that people were thinking a bit more tolerantly in 2008 than in 2000, and tells us that it was only the absolute virulence of the Prop 8 supporters that got it through. We shouldn’t sugarcoat the hatred behind Prop 8 – it was always intended as a slap in the face of same-sex couples and their supporters. Prop 8 supporters were quite open that they despised having gay marriage thrown at them, and that they felt it was wrong for various reasons. Brendan Eich’s support for the proposition, including his financial contributions to it, place him in the camp of people who wanted to once again say NO to same-sex couples and keep us in a world where those couples would be considered second-class citizens. Sadly for the anti-gay forces, Prop 8 got tossed by the courts even faster than Prop 22, with a huge hit coming in 2010 and then a final knockout blow finishing it off in 2013. These guys are still smarting from that, and one wonders what they’ll come up with for an encore. It’s not surprising that Mozilla was publicly embarrassed and shamed by their CEO’s conduct in this matter. It’s also not surprising that Eich decided to resign rather than further besmirch the company. That’s not a matter of him having his free speech censored. It’s a matter of him properly being called out for doing something hateful, and the right wing not liking that one bit.

Huckabee thinks it’s a good analogy to accuse President Obama of supporting Proposition 8, as a way of providing political cover for Eich and other homophobes like Huckabee. Except that Barack Obama expressly OPPOSED Proposition 8. He said that while he personally believed in 2008 that marriage was between a man and a woman and he supported civil unions to allow legal status to other couples, he found initiatives like Prop 8 to be “divisive and discriminatory” in their attempts to change the constitution to codify discrimination. There’s a big difference between saying you personally have a belief about marriage, and openly supporting legislation that would discriminate against one group of people. Huckabee knows this, but he’s hoping that his listeners won’t.

Of course, Huckabee can’t resist pushing the analogy even farther over the line. So he makes up this straw man argument that the left insisted on Brendan Eich resigning because somehow they are intolerant and not interested in free speech. Huckabee makes the wild statement that right wingers are inclusive of everyone’s speech, and says that the proof of this is how he personally enjoys the music of Barbra Streisand regardless of her politics. I’m thankful that I wasn’t drinking anything when he said this over the weekend as I might have laughed it right out of my nose. Let’s see? Huckabee wants us to think that the right wing is TOLERANT and INCLUSIVE? That the right wing would NEVER boycott a product over politics? Really?

Perhaps Huckabee has heard of Bill O’Reilly? You know, the guy who advocated for a boycott against all French products in the early 2000s because they opposed the US attack on Iraq? (And this during a time when US right wingers made the heroic choice to relabel “French Fries” as “Freedom Fries”?) The guy who advocated for a boycott on anyone travelling to Aruba over the Natalie Holloway case? The guy who called for a boycott against Pepsi over their use of Ludacris as a pitchman? (O’Reilly doesn’t get to weasel out of his behavior by saying ‘Hey, I don’t think I used the actual WORD boycott’ since his stated intention was for his viewers to refuse to buy Pepsi…) Perhaps Huckabee has heard of One Million Moms, a right wing group that regularly calls for boycotts against such outrageous institutions as Toys R Us and JC Penneys. Maybe Huckabee knows Rush Limbaugh, who told his listeners to boycott GM in 2009.

Or perhaps Mike Huckabee is aware of a right wing pundit who advocated for a boycott of NPR when they fired Juan Williams for bigotry. Huckabee might remember this, as it happened recently, in October 2010. This pundit was so angry about Williams being called out for his behavior that the pundit even called for Congress to cut NPR’s funding. This pundit was certainly not calling for “More speech” like Huckabee would prefer today. The pundit’s name? Oh. It was Mike Huckabee!

Hmmmm.