Every year, this bilious fuckwit does an even poorer job of concealing how hateful he really is.
Mike Huckabee has pulled to the front of the ranks of GOP contenders in the polls, for now, prompting this analysis from James Poulos, who thinks it won’t last.
Then reality creeps in. Huckabee’s all-purpose hodgepodge has a dark side: For every component that makes a Republican smile, there’s one that makes them cringe. He’s too soft to play political hardball, too coddled to handle a hostile press. Mike Huckabee is not a nerd because he’s not an intellectual. In a tight election, instead of Florida, Wisconsin, or New Jersey, Huckabee can theoretically deliver… Arkansas.
And what was that about compassionate conservatism again? Huckabee’s bleeding-heart populism is out of step with the times. Tea Partiers don’t want to be lectured about caring. Libertarians don’t want to be led on a heroic mission of national helping. Moreover, the mess he’d inherit from Obama plays to Huckabee’s weaknesses. NSA surveillance? WMD deals with Syria and Iran? Black ops? Dirty wars? You may as well ask Frankenstein’s monster to twerk.
Look, I agree that Huckabee is a go-nowhere fuckwit, but it’s not because he’s too compassionate. Where are we even getting this? Is that how powerful the need to believe there is such a thing as a “compassionate” or “populist” conservative is, that we’re putting that on a man who has shown zero evidence for having either compassion or even the faintest desire to use the government for anything more than a weapon to punish women and people of color for getting too uppity?
This man straight up claimed that women who want their own insurance to cover their actual medications are looking to “Uncle Sugar”. That is not compassion. That’s not giving. That’s actually so mean-spirited that he actually begrudges allowing women to use a service—their own health insurance—they paid for because he disapproves of their sex lives.
The reason Huckabee is done for is that he doesn’t live up to the public image that he’s created, with mainstream media help, as an affable and kindly uncle. People like to think of him that way and then he bothers to open his mouth and we’re all suddenly and horribly reminded that he is an asshole who believes that the vast majority of Americans are hellbound sinners that are beneath contempt. The veneer of affability is tissue-thin. It relies on not listening to him speak, because the second he does, the ill-concealed rage he projects onto the rest of the world for daring to think that we matter as human beings comes pouring out of him. He is really a bilious man who only gets people to pretend he’s not because that’s what being an entitled white man gets you in America. But he puts people off their lunch. He makes Mitt Romney look like a nice person. That’s why his candidacy will go nowhere. I have no doubt his megawatt asshole talk at the RNC lifted him in the GOP polls, but that’s because primary voters in the Republican party really love assholes. But they know better than to actually nominate one for President, and do what they always do, which is find someone like John McCain or Mitt Romney that it a little better at putting on a show of pretending to care. Mark my words: 2008 was the best that Huckabee will ever do, and he’ll be out of the race before the end of 2015.