Matt Yglesias

Huckabee Making Strong Bid to Lose “Likeable Conservative” Credentials

I met Mike Huckabee once, briefly, and he was extremely charming. He offered up more of what I’d seen in the best of Mike Huckabee on television—a charismatic, friendly guy who laced his conservatism with real Christian values like generosity and humility. And then there’s this guy:

“The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics may be dead,” said Huckabee, “but a Union of American Socialist Republics is being born.” Democrats, according to Huckabee, were packing 40 years of pet projects like “health care rationing” into spending bills. “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”

Steve Benen says “I suspect that if a prominent Democratic office holder, in 2005, delivered a speech referring to George W. Bush’s agenda as “fascism,” comparing his administration to totalitarian regimes, and casually throwing in a reference to Hitler, that Democrat would have a very difficult time being taken seriously by the political establishment moving forward.” Indeed, recall that when Dick Durbin compared American mistreatment of detainees to maltreatment of prisons in the Gulag, we was pressured into offering a groveling apology. In Durbin’s case, though, one could see the point of the comparison.

Why Huckabee thinks that federally funded research into determining which medical treatments are effective is similar to being a totalitarian mass-murderer is a bit beyond me. But it’s par for the course in the uglier corners of conservatism, they’re just not corners Huckabee’s been known for dwelling in.