Tag: mike huckabee
Mike Huckabee

Why Violent Threats Are Driving Our Politics Now

Maybe I’m losing my mojo. For all the chatter about political violence out there, this column hasn’t drawn a death threat in months. Maybe not even this calendar year.

They used to come in fairly regularly. One time, a junior high gym teacher in Pennsylvania said he was coming to get me over a smart-aleck joke about the baleful effects of civics education by football coaches. Another guy used to send handwritten letters threatening to rape and mutilate my wife.

Then there was the Special Forces veteran who imagined I’d written something disrespectful about Irish Catholics. (There are a lot more war heroes among angry emailers than the public at large, I’ve noticed.) Perhaps intemperately, I advised him to get lost.

“Your basically a coward,” he responded.

What is it about right-wing soreheads and apostrophes, I wonder? MANY ALSO PREFER TO EXPRESS THEMSELVES IN ALL CAPS. Another mystery. I see something written that way, I press delete. Doesn’t everybody?

But let’s get serious. Out in the real world, there’s growing evidence that threats of violence are playing an increasing role in political decision-making. No less an eminence than Mike Huckabee — onetime Baptist preacher, former Arkansas governor, current TV quack-remedy peddler — has warned that unless Donald Trump is declared the winner of the 2024 presidential contest, the nation will turn from “ballots to bullets” to settle the issue.

TV preachers just love alliterative wordplay, which rarely fails to arouse the influential Moron-American community.

In Little Rock, the Huckster’s daughter, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, recently failed to overhaul the state’s Freedom of Information Act, which was supposedly necessary to protect her family from threats from “the radical left.” (In Arkansas, the radical left is anybody that believes in speed limits and stop signs.) Cynics thought Sanders was more aggravated by the Blue Hog Report, a blog that used the law to show that she’d commandeered a state police airplane to travel from Fayetteville to Rogers — adjoining cities. Documented flight time: 11 minutes. Queen Sarah, some call her.

Anyway, the GOP-dominated state legislature denied Sanders her FOIA overhaul, passing a significantly scaled-down version instead.

More seriously, though, Sen. Mitt Romney says that his recently announced retirement from politics results, in part, from an increasing barrage of death threats. Romney told biographer McKay Coppins that he’d recently been forced to spend $5,000 a day on private security for his family.

According to Coppins, as quoted in The Atlantic: “One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety. The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him — why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome?”

Put that way, it’s hard not to sympathize. It’s one thing to be an obscure newspaper columnist who goes unrecognized at the dog park, and another to be a Washington politician whose face appears on national TV.

Almost needless to say, these threats emanate almost entirely from the spiritual descendants of Oklahoma City truck bomber Timothy McVeigh: racially obsessed white nationalists. Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney has spoken of similar fears, as has former Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer. Both aroused right-wing ire by speaking out against the Trump-inspired MAGA rioting at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

No need to kid ourselves about where it’s coming from. Pretty much all mass shooters turn out to be infected with right-wing dogma. According to Philip Bump in the Washington Post, “Analysis from the Anti-Defamation League published this year found that, in the past five years, there have been more than 170 deaths linked to right-wing extremism. Three have been linked to extremism on the left.”

Last year, Sen. Lindsey Graham predicted that there would be “riots in the streets” if Trump was indicted for willfully and deliberately storing top-secret nuclear weapons documents in a publicly accessible country club bathroom. Trump himself, of course, was only too happy to amplify the remark. He continues to hint that outrage about his upcoming criminal trials will spark violence.

And yet nothing has happened. Why? Well, at the expense of sounding like a pre-Trump conservative, because the authorities have been ready. In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot, two things have become clear: First, you’ll lose the battle; second, you’ll end up doing serious time in a federal prison.

All the plotting and posing by Proud Boys chieftain Enrique Tarrio got him 22 years in the slammer.

Boo-hoo-hoo.

Look, this is America. Of course, there will be violence. Shocking, sickening violence. But the Trump/McVeigh faction is still going to lose.

Reprinted with permission from Sun Times.

Trump Declares Victory In Fabricated ‘War On Christmas’

Trump Declares Victory In Fabricated ‘War On Christmas’

Former President Donald Trump is insisting the so-called "War on Christmas" is over. However, there is just one problem: Many are still trying to determine whether or not there was ever an actual attack on Christmas, since Trump fabricated the entire thing.

On Thursday, the disgraced former president appeared on Newsmax for an interview with Mike Huckabee. During the bizarre sitdown, Huckabee claimed America has Trump to thank for bringing back "Merry Christmas" as opposed to "Happy Holidays."“America had gone through a long period where people quit saying ‘Merry Christmas.’ It was all ‘Happy Holidays.’ You deliberately changed that!” Huckabee told Trump.

In Trump fashion, the former president quickly agreed with Huckabee as he took credit for ending the "war."

“When I started campaigning, I said you’re going to say ‘Merry Christmas’ again, and now people are saying it,” Trump said, according to The Daily Beast, before pivoting to rant about how the “'George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson' are 'being obliterated because of craziness.'”

But they are saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again,” Trump added. “I would say it all the time during that period, that we want them to say ‘Merry Christmas.’ Don’t shop at stores that don’t say ‘Merry Christmas’ and I’ll tell you, we brought it back very quickly.”

“You really did,” Huckabee agreed as the Christmas scenery at Trump's Mar-a-Lago golf club appeared on the screen.

Trump went on to add more fuel to the fire. “Whether you’re Muslim, whether you’re Christian, whether you’re Jewish, everyone loves Christmas," he said, adding, "And they say ‘Merry Christmas’—until these crazy people came along and they wanted to stop it along with everything else.”

Although Huckabee praised Trump for his so-called efforts, the Beast highlights the irony in the network's interview of Trump reporting that "Newsmax decided to call its own company gathering this year—for which all attendees had to be vaccinated—a “Holiday Reception.” So it seems the war lives on."

Article reprinted with permission from Alternet

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee Tweets Weirdly Racist Attack On ‘Chinese’ —And Gets Hosed Down

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Former Arkansas Governor and Baptist minister Mike Huckabee chose Easter weekend to sink to an unimaginable low, practically spitting in the face of Asian American communities, apparently because Republicans lost a presidential election. Democrats argue that the 2020 defeat, coupled with twin losses in Senate runoff elections in Georgia. triggered more restrictive voting laws throughout the country and especially in the Peach State, where a recently passed law makes it illegal to give water and food to voters standing in line to cast ballots. Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian and Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey spoke out against the law and Major League Baseball vowed to move its 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta because of the law.

Applying the usual nonsensical GOP logic, Huckabee decided those moves were somehow connected to an outpouring of support for Asian Americans following a spike in racist and violent acts against the community. "I've decided to 'identify' as Chinese," he tweeted sarcastically on Saturday. "Coke will like me, Delta will agree with my 'values' and I'll probably get shoes from Nike & tickets to @MLB games. Ain't America great?"

The tweet earned Huckabee well-earned criticism on social media. Rep. Ted Lieu tweeted on Saturday: "Hey Mike Huckabee, I asked around and Coke likes me, Delta agrees with my values, I wear Nikes and my hometown Dodgers won the World Series. But it's not because of my ethnicity. It's because I'm not a sh*thead like you who is adding fuel to anti-Asian hate. #StopAAPIHate" Comedian John Fugelsang tweeted: "Yes except for the part where racist Mike Huckabee fans accuse you of spreading a virus."

Democrat Jake Lobin tweeted: "I can't believe Mike Huckabee's job has been to actually govern people. Holy shit." Author and unitarian pastor John Pavlovitz tweeted: "Mike Huckabee motivated me to do this work. The day of the Sandy Hook shooting he inexplicably used the murder of children to spread a cancerous religion. It made me realize as a pastor that I needed to explicitly oppose monsters like him who bastardize my faith tradition."

"He and his party are antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and adversarial to diverse humanity," Pavlovitz added in another tweet. "Good people can simply not allow them to steer this nation into the abyss—and we won't."

Black corporate leaders have advocated for other corporations to take a stand against the restrictive new Georgia law, The New York Times reported. "There is no middle ground here," former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault said. "You either are for more people voting, or you want to suppress the vote." His remarks followed Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp's decision to sign into law a bill state Republicans rushed through the legislature in the final hour, slithering just outside of the public eye after earlier criticism for similarly restrictive voting bills.

With only eight days left in the state legislative session, Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Greg Bluestein tweeted that the Georgia House adopted the measure on a party-line vote working to "restrict drop boxes, require voter ID for mail-in ballots and gives the Republican-controlled Legislature more authority over local elections officials." The state Senate followed suit.

Merck pharmaceutical company CEO Kenneth Frazier told The New York Times he and other executives began emailing and texting each other following the passage of Georgia's law. Their goal is to stop other restrictive voting bills from passing across the country. "As African-American business executives, we don't have the luxury of being bystanders to injustice," Frazier said. "We don't have the luxury of sitting on the sidelines when these kinds of injustices are happening all around us."

Fox News

To Save Trump, Fox News Urges Voiding Hundreds Of Thousands Of Votes

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters

With the presidential election still up in the air as ballots continue to be counted in key states, President Donald Trump and his propagandists at Fox News are seeking to reduce confidence in the election tallies in order to build a case to toss out Democratic ballots and steal the election.

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