Mike Huckabee has written a book, in which he proclaims the superiority of the Bubba, and he's getting some pushback. Jon Stewart pointed out the inconsistency between the Huckster's condemnation of Beyonce, given his own former role as a side guitar man for a performance of Cat Scratch Fever. Here, Huck is defending himself for his anti-dance views in his teenage years.
What interests me about all this is the fact that most members of the media either don't understand what Huckabee is doing, or prefer to make believe they don't understand. Not to put too fine a point in it: Huckabee is not running for president, he is grifting.
Gail Collins almost gets there, but she really doesn't get it, or she wouldn't have said:
While Mike Huckabee is almost certainly not going to be the Republican presidential nominee, he is a real candidate.
She's absolutely right in the first portion of that sentence, and absolutely wrong in the second, because Mike Huckabee, were he pumped full of truth serum, would admit what he knows perfectly well: that he is not a real candidate, as he has no hope of winning, nor does he desire to do so. Like Sarah, he knows that there's lots of money to be made out there on the hustings, and he's going to grab his share. What better way to grab a goodly share of the sucker's money than by playing to their sense of victimhood and assuring them that they are, in fact, better than all those people who are smarter than they are? But, contrariwise, what better way to assure you'll never be president than by systematically insulting a huge percentage of the population? Sure, Ted Cruz plays to the stupid Southerners, but he doesn't do it by openly bashing the rest of us. Like any politician that wants to get elected, he speaks in deniable code, so he can turn around and bash the media if anyone openly decodes what he says. Huckabee is not doing that, or, more accurately, he is making what he knows is an ineffectual Palin-like gesture in that direction. There can be no surer sign that he's joined Sarah as a grifter, milking the Republican base for every dollar he can get. Grifting is a multi-million dollar Republican industry, and Huckabee wouldn't have left Fox unless he'd concluded that he could make more money grifting than bloviating. That why he's happy to let Jon Stewart make him look like a fool in the eyes of the rational. He sells 10,000 books every time he (and by extension, all those “Bubbas”) get laughed at by Stewart's audience. No one actually reads those books, by the way.
We Democrats can take some pride in the fact that there is no Huckabee or Palin analog on the left. Long may that remain the case.
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