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Stephen Colbert has been on a brilliant streak that has been going for years now. Mike Huckabee was put On Notice by Colbert because of two strange and mentally challenged rants last week by the Foxer. Stephen was a bit perturbed when 'The Huckster' attacked Natalie Portman for being pregnant, but not married. However, what really got his goat was Mike telling right wing talkie, Steve Malzberg that Obama was born in Kenya and then just digging deeper into dog whistle territory. Yeah, Huckabee said he misspoke because he really meant to say Indonesia, but he freakishly then went into a dissertation on the Mau Mau Revolution. Did the Mau Mau Revolution take place in Indonesia? And is there any evidence Barack Obama had ever even heard of it while growing up?
Huckabee: When he gave the back the … bust of Winston Churchill, a great insult to the British. But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.
Colbert said this bothered him:
Colbert; Now, in case you missed it, he said Obama grew up in Kenya, with his Kenyan father. Kenya, Kenya, Kenya. First off, Obama didn't grow up in Kenya, he was born in Kenya before moving to Islamistan to where he traveled back in time to plant his birth announcement in a Hawaiian newspaper. But I understand the Governor's point. The Kenyan view of the Mau Mau revolution is far different than the American view which is generally "what is the Mau Mau revolution?"
--OK, he simply misspoke for five minutes about the Mau Mau revolution which he evidently thought happened in Indonesia for five minutes. The important thing isn't where the Mau Mau revolution happened. The important thing is for people to start associating Barack Obama with the words Mau Mau...
Leslie Savan of The Nation writes about the coded racism Huckabee is deploying:
That’s when Huckabee, to the surprise of most everyone, started squawking that President Obama grew up in Kenya, where he was influenced by his father’s and grandfathers’ anticolonial Mau-Mauism to despise the British Empire—and, by implication, all white power.
Only after being called out did the Fox News host say he “misspoke” on the growing up in Kenya part (he later claimed he apologized, though that, too, isn’t true). Then he blamed the media for attacking him, and simply relocated the lie from Kenya to Indonesia. “Most of us,” he told far-right radio talker Bryan Fischer, “grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas.” (Of course, Obama was born and grew up primarily in Hawaii, spending only the years between ages 6 and 10 in Indonesia—where, by the way, there were Rotary Clubs and he was a Cub Scout. In fact, according to the Boy Scouts of America, “The BSA is the second-largest Scouting organization in the world. The largest is in Indonesia.”)
Huckabee even managed to trash his relatively decent stand on Obama’s birthplace. “What I have never done,” he said,“is taken the position that Obama was born in Kenya or Indonesia or anywhere other than Hawaii, where he claims to have been born.” That little “claims” is of a weasely piece with John Boehner, who says he “believes” that Obama is an American-born Christian because he takes the president “at his word.”
To be an electable Republican today you don’t have to be racist, you just have to convince racists that you’re not going to make them feel uncomfortable. You have to genuflect, speak ambiguously, and hope that independent voters forget all that by the general election.
All this garbage started last year with Dinesh D’Souza’s repulsive headliner for Forbes, which maintained that Obama’s “anti-business” policies could be explained only by his “Kenyan anti-colonialism.” That other presidential flirt, Newt Gingrich, had hailed this nonsense as the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama" and “the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.” “What if he is so outside our comprehension" that he can be understood “only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior?” (The media long ago should have retired its characterization of Gingrich as an “intellect,” but, remarkably, you still hear it.)
But here’s a simpler theory: The right spews this bizarre “anticolonial” claptrap because it gives them a chance to say “Mau Mau,” which conjures a more fearsome threat than the N-word itself.
You can always count on Dinesh to be one of the most disgusting of the wingnuts, but one who manages to fly under the radar most of the time.
