Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus invited former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to be the keynote speaker at the RNC’s winter meeting, but it appears that he regrets that decision:
Priebus responded to Huckabee’s comments, telling the Washington Post, “I don’t know what he was talking about. Sort of a goofy way of using some phrases. Not the way I would have phrased it.”
I don’t know what Mike Huckabee was talking about, either. When he was serving as governor, Huckabee signed a law mandating that health insurance plans provide contraceptive coverage, and he made no exceptions for religious institutions. And, despite the fact that his hero Jesus was quite clear that he had nothing but the harshest contempt for hypocrites, Huckabee is now behaving as if contraceptive coverage in health care plans is some kind of violation of people’s religious rights.
His actual comments were more than ‘goofy.’ They were nonsensical. I don’t know if he asks his nieces to refer to him as ‘Uncle Sugar,’ but I certainly hope not. The main thing is that he wants us to have a national discussion about contraception.
“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. Let us take that discussion all across America.”
I’m not sure that anyone knows quite what the hell that comment is supposed to mean. He later explained that “My point was to point out that Dems have put a laser-like focus on government funded birth control and given it more attention than cancer drugs.”
Does anyone think Huckabee’s point was that Democrats are not highlighting enough how ObamaCare is giving people access to life-saving cancer drugs?
Anyone?
I’ve tried to decipher Huckabee’s meaning and I’ve read other people’s attempts to explain his comments, but I think I’ll have to chalk it up to some kind of cultural misunderstanding. It’s kind of like the tension I feel between having total contempt for how Saudi Arabia treats women and religious freedom and my tolerance for different cultures having different laws and beliefs. Maybe your typical Saudi understands what Huckabee was trying to say, but I certainly don’t. I can hardly believe that I share the same country with the man.
As best as I can tell, he was saying that Republicans have enough respect for women to believe that they can remain chaste until marriage, as they should. Maybe ObamaCare should cover the expense of burkas. Would Huckabee support that?
I’m not sure that we need to attempt to undertake any kind of in-depth evaluation of what Huckabee was trying to accomplish. The GOP has deteriorated to the point that almost nothing that any of them says has anything to do with policy or their platform as a Party.
It is now simply about throwing out the appropriate far-right conceptual worldview and sprinkling it with enough buzzwords and right wing cliches that it will trigger the dog-whistles that motivate the reptilian branch of their party.
The Republican Party is now mostly devoid of any intellectual capacity to present cogent ideas and well-thought-out policy proposals that any sensible person might feel should be entertained as legitimate. They are simply a shell, held together by an assortment of disparate corporate business interests, radical religious nuts, bigots of all stripes and tin foil hat conspiracists.
yep.
I don’t recall that the ACA provides for an Uncle Sugar but then I haven’t read the entire thing.
And yet here we are talking about another Rep word bomb that defies all attempts to unpack instead of, oh I don’t know, the extension of UI? The stupider the declaration of the Rep, the more time the Left allows to pull them out of the rabbit hole. Meanwhile, the answer, like we use with trolls, should be to declare them (& their words)a troll, ban them and continue on with resolving the real problems of the day.
A clue from the Urban Dictionary, 2007:
“Uncle Sugar” is a dog whistle, and Huckabee’s a little more contemptible than we thought.
I think it’s hilarious and pathetic that now every time one of these chowderheads opens his yap to suck up to their Base, they define how stupid they are. And it’s funnier still that their fellow chowderheads are now rushing in to “clarify” what the other guy said.
Haha! Christie, well, he’s not a thug! Oops, Huckabee didn’t mean what he said about women! And Rick Santorum is rushing out to defend Huckabee?!
Pure comedy gold.
“My point was to point out that Dems have put a laser-like focus on government funded birth control and given it more attention than cancer drugs.” – Slim Fast Huckabee
Do these folks like to project or what? Dems wouldn’t be concerned about birth control if GOP wasn’t making a full time job out of making it unavailable to participants in the health care market.
Notice how he slips in the little gem about “government funded”? That might be the main goal here, to cloud the issue as being a freebie from the taxpayers.
In reality, insurance companies are more than willing to include birth control coverage for free, since it reduces costs by avoiding costly pregnancies. How is that “government funded”? Oh, because it’s actually abortion and NO! Federal money can be spent on that!
Remember.
If the GOP points out that Democrats hate America, it is a Republican projecting his hatred of America onto that Democrat.
The only thing the Republican party has left is Cognitive Dissonance, Projection, Racism, and outright Dumbfuckery.
They don’t have any policy besides cutting taxes on rich people and try to murder as many non-whites as possible.
Period.