Mike Huckabee’s Unconscionable Attack on the First Lady and Beyoncé

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For years Republicans have insisted on an apology for anything said about them, however true, while their own rhetoric has devolved from mud- to feces-slinging. That has never been truer than in Mike Huckabee’s attack on the Obamas for letting their daughter listen to Beyoncé.

The Obama’s are unabashed Beyoncé fans, and Beyoncé, Jay Z and their daughter, Blue Ivy were at the First Lady’s birthday party in January. Michelle Obama has taken her daughters to Beyoncé’s concerts.

So, of course, to Mike Huckabee, looking to make a splash with the gun-toting, black-hating, ethnic nationalist Republican base, this is a big deal.

In an interview published Tuesday in People Magazine,

That’s the whole point. I don’t understand how on one hand they can be such doting parents and so careful about the intake of everything – how much broccoli they eat and where they go to school and making sure they’re kind of sheltered and shielded from so many things – and yet they don’t see anything that might not be suitable for either a preteen or a teen in some of the lyrical content and choreography of Beyoncé, who has sort of a regular key to the [White House] door.

In his opinion, Beyoncé’s dance moves are “best left for the privacy of her bedroom.”

Of course, as Max Lockie points out at Bloomberg Politics, Huckabee is a huge Ted Nugent fan, and,

From draft-dodging to singing an ode to comely 13-year-old girls to dropping n-bombs and supporting apartheid, The Nuge is no stranger to “obnoxious and toxic mental poison,” and apparently that’s just fine with the governor.

Of course, “the Nuge” is not a black woman, but a white male. I’m not sayin’. I’m just sayin’.

The master of relativistic morality, not to say hypocrisy, Huckabee managed to attack two popular and successful black women in the same sentence:

With the first lady so concerned about making sure her daughters’ bellies don’t ingest unhealthy food, how can she let their brains ingest obnoxious and toxic mental poison in the form of song lyrics? If lived out, those lyrics would be far more devastating to someone’s health than a cupcake.

This parenting critique is coming from the man whose son hung a dog.

David Huckabee was 17 when, back in 1998 at Boy Scouts camp – where he was working as a camp counselor no less – Camp Pioneer, he saw a stray. Did he take the dog in? Did he ignore it? Did he shoo it away? Did he call somebody else to deal with the dog? No. He hanged the dog from a tree.

He told Newsweek, in his own defense, that, “There was a dog that apparently had mange and was absolutely, I guess, emaciated.”

Um, so feed it? Give it a bath?

There were ugly rumors that the intrepid camp counselors had also slit the dog’s throat and stoned it to death.

Mike Huckabee claimed it looked like it was going to attack. If it looks like a stray dog is going to attack, do you even go near it so you can hang it? None of it makes any sense. I guess if David would have had a Glock that day, we’d be telling a whole ‘nother story today.

Newsweek tells us of the sordid episodes aftermath, which was near as sordid as the event itself:

[The incident] prompted the local prosecuting attorney— bombarded with complaints generated by a national animal-rights group—to write a letter to the Arkansas state police seeking help investigating whether David and another teenager had violated state animal-cruelty laws. The state police never granted the request, and no charges were ever filed. But John Bailey, then the director of Arkansas’s state police, tells NEWSWEEK that Governor Huckabee’s chief of staff and personal lawyer both leaned on him to write a letter officially denying the local prosecutor’s request. Bailey, a career officer who had been appointed chief by Huckabee’s Democratic predecessor, said he viewed the lawyer’s intervention as improper and terminated the conversation. Seven months later, he was called into Huckabee’s office and fired. “I’ve lost confidence in your ability to do your job,” Bailey says Huckabee told him. One reason Huckabee cited was “I couldn’t get you to help me with my son when I had that problem,” according to Bailey. “Without question, [Huckabee] was making a conscious attempt to keep the state police from investigating his son,” says I. C. Smith, the former FBI chief in Little Rock, who worked closely with Bailey and called him a “courageous” and “very solid” professional.

Huckabee, reported Fox News, said that Mike Huckabee believed politics were behind the dog-killing accusations, not – you know – the fact that his son hung a dog.

This is the man who would be president, America.

And that doesn’t include the time in 2007 that David Huckabee was caught at Little Rock National Airport with a Glock and a clip in his carry-on bag. He hung the dog because it was emaciated. He had the pistol because in true, well-trained gun-owner fashion, he “forgot it was there.”

The 2007 mugshot of Dog-hanging, Glock-carrying David Huckabee

Mike Huckabee’s response was to say, “It’s one of those stupid things. He knows better.”

Well, that was actually the second of two stupid things. All Obama’s daughters have done is listen to music.

I think if there is one person on the planet who shouldn’t be criticizing the Obamas as parents, it is maybe Mike Huckabee.

Which brings us to Huckabee’s completely over-the-top attack on Beyoncé and her husband, rapper Jay-Z.

In his book, “God, Guns, Grits and Gravy,” Huckabee describes the Grammy Award-winning Beyoncé’s lyrics as “obnoxious and toxic mental poison,” and accuses her husband, Jay-Z, of pimping his wife:

Beyoncé is incredibly talented – gifted, in fact. She has an exceptional set of pipes and can actually sing. She is a terrific dancer – without the explicit moves best left for the privacy of her bedroom. Jay Z is a very shrewd businessman, but I wonder: Does it occur to him that he is arguably crossing the line from husband to pimp by exploiting his wife as a sex object?

As Ruben Navarette wrote at CNN yesterday, “While Republicans like Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky talk about the importance of reaching out to African-Americans, Huckabee may have reached a new low in terms of offending them.” And it’s safe to say Beyoncé has sold more albums than Huckabee will ever sell books.

While Huckabee is busy calling Beyoncé a whore, the contraceptive-opposing rape-enthusiast accuses Democrats of insulting women:

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,” Huckabee said. “Let us take that discussion all across America.

By all accounts, Huckabee is considering a run at the presidency. It is interesting that he thinks building his platform around an attack on a popular singer and her husband, and on the sitting President’s and First Lady’s parenting skills, is the way to proceed.

Michelle Obama has had too much class to respond to these attacks, but the rest of us might wonder, and should demand to know, how the expression of a woman’s sexuality is more of a threat to civilization than starving children and homeless families, veterans without healthcare for the wars his political party sent them to fight, and seniors having their security net pulled out from beneath them.

Mike Huckabee has demonstrated not only his own lack of parenting skills, but shown through his confused, relativistic, and distinctly un-American values, that he has no place aspiring to the highest office in the land.

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Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen's Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.

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