“What Was Huckabee Talking About?”: I Can Hardly Believe That I Share The Same Country With The Man
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus invited former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to be the keynote speaker at the RNC’s winter meeting, but it appears that he regrets that decision:
Priebus responded to Huckabee’s comments, telling the Washington Post, “I don’t know what he was talking about. Sort of a goofy way of using some phrases. Not the way I would have phrased it.”
I don’t know what Mike Huckabee was talking about, either. When he was serving as governor, Huckabee signed a law mandating that health insurance plans provide contraceptive coverage, and he made no exceptions for religious institutions. And, despite the fact that his hero Jesus was quite clear that he had nothing but the harshest contempt for hypocrites, Huckabee is now behaving as if contraceptive coverage in health care plans is some kind of violation of people’s religious rights.
His actual comments were more than ‘goofy.’ They were nonsensical. I don’t know if he asks his nieces to refer to him as ‘Uncle Sugar,’ but I certainly hope not. The main thing is that he wants us to have a national discussion about contraception.
“If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it. Let us take that discussion all across America.”
I’m not sure that anyone knows quite what the hell that comment is supposed to mean. He later explained that “My point was to point out that Dems have put a laser-like focus on government funded birth control and given it more attention than cancer drugs.”
Does anyone think Huckabee’s point was that Democrats are not highlighting enough how ObamaCare is giving people access to life-saving cancer drugs?
Anyone?
I’ve tried to decipher Huckabee’s meaning and I’ve read other people’s attempts to explain his comments, but I think I’ll have to chalk it up to some kind of cultural misunderstanding. It’s kind of like the tension I feel between having total contempt for how Saudi Arabia treats women and religious freedom and my tolerance for different cultures having different laws and beliefs. Maybe your typical Saudi understands what Huckabee was trying to say, but I certainly don’t. I can hardly believe that I share the same country with the man.
As best as I can tell, he was saying that Republicans have enough respect for women to believe that they can remain chaste until marriage, as they should. Maybe ObamaCare should cover the expense of burkas. Would Huckabee support that?
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 25, 2014
“Here They Go Again”: Why Women Do Not Love Mike Huckabee
A few weeks ago, right after the dark clouds gathered over Chris Christie’s presidential prospects, some friends and I were having the usual Washington conversation of discussing the rest of the field. After we agreed that it was an awfully B-list bench, someone piped up: Hey, don’t forget Mike Huckabee! He’s losing all the weight!
Clearly, some of that vaporized body mass came out of his brain matter, based on his unhinged comments Wednesday at the Republican Party’s winter meeting. Discussing the GOP’s need to get more of the women’s vote, he said the Democratic Party tells women “they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government.”
He said this, amazingly, in a speech that, in his mind anyway, was all about how the Republican Party is the true friend of women: “The fact is the Republicans don’t have a war on women, they have a war for women, to empower them to be something other than victims of their gender.”
Here we go again. What galaxy do these right-wing men live in? So now contraception is like welfare? I’m reading him right, right? This is what he said—in essence, that birth control, provided by people who think women can’t control their libidos, makes women “helpless.” It’s the culture of dependency again, but this time transferred from the ghetto to the uterus. The Democrats, I guess, want women to go out and have unrestrained sex, so Democrats can then go out and destroy America by distributing these sinful contraceptive devices. So women, you see, are not human beings with agency and volition about their sexuality in Huckabee Land. They’re nothing more than the cat’s paws of the godless, baby-killing Democrats, who want to keep them on the Democratic plantation. The Pill, the welfare check, the Earned Income Tax Credit—all the work of Satan, propagated by the party of Satan.
As with Todd Akin and other recent Republican men who’ve been such marvelous spokesmen for the female side, it’s just hard to believe that this offensive gibberish even came out of his mouth. And not in an interview, as was the case with Akin, who was caught off-guard, but in a prepared speech! How do these men come to these views?
Just yesterday I discovered an old news clip from late 2012, in which some bozo Ohio state legislator is being interviewed on Al Jazeera. He’s throwing lightning bolts around about how evil abortion is, and he’d really prefer if we could ban it all the time. Then the reporter asks: “What do you think makes a woman want to have an abortion?” This genius hems and haws and finally says: “I don’t know. It’s a question I’ve never even thought about.”
What can one say? The man is trying to ban abortion in the state of Ohio, and he’s never thought about why a woman might want one. Certainly he’d never actually asked a woman. That, I think, is what makes these right-wing men say these deranged things. They either never discuss these matters with women, or they discuss them only with women who are as right-wing and moralistic as they are and who don’t just speak as a normal, apolitical woman with the normal level of sexual desire and activity would. So they haven’t the slightest idea what regular women think, nor the slightest interest in it. That’s just incuriosity. But it’s an incuriosity that produces ignorance and intolerance, which is what the GOP specializes in these days.
The thing about Huckabee is that he used to hide this very well. I’d imagine that deep down, he’s as Old Testament fire-and-brimstone as they come—a biblical literalist, right down to Jonah living in the whale’s stomach, the whole schmear. But he managed not to come across that way. He cracked jokes. He liked reporters (a media-friendly conservative!). He played rock ’n’roll bass guitar, for gosh sakes. If he was a mullah, he was at least a good-natured one who didn’t seem threatening.
But after this speech, forget that. He’s just a mullah now. He’s mad at birth control, which virtually every woman uses and which has been legal in this country for 54 years! And there was no small dose of acid in his voice as he spit out the infamous sentences, and he looked mad. Now, he’s going to be lumped in with Akin and cited, and very rightly so, as Exhibit B (Akin is still A) in why the Republicans would just be better off not talking about women at all and living with a 12- to 14-point gender gap, because every time one of them opens his mouth it just increases.
Incidentally, his cluelessness Wednesday wasn’t limited to women. My colleague Ben Jacobs, who was there, tells me Huck rhapsodized about The Beatles, and how he once fantasized about being the “fifth Beatle” and delivered the opinion that they healed the country after Kennedy’s assassination. He has no idea what he’s talking about. They weren’t interested in “healing” anything. Quite the contrary, they started the revolution that split the country in two, the two sides that are still doing battle, and Huckabee sure ain’t on their side. Reactionary fundamentalists of Huckabee’s ilk despised The Beatles in 1964, and The Beatles—authority-haters and atheists one and all (except for George later, but that was very different), and Lord knows great believers in the powers of contraception—would have despised him. Besides which, they already had a pretty good bassist, Bub.
His rewriting of Beatles history is a minor transgression but it’s of a piece. These people live in a morally simplistic fantasy land that’s impervious to facts and to the very real complexities of life. And he’s reportedly thinking of seeking the GOP nomination again? Come to think of it, he’d be perfect.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 24, 2014
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