In some ways, it's a sad waste of time to write about Mike Huckabee, currently running for the GOP nomination for president. He doesn't have a snowball's chance in global warming of winning. His whole campaign reeks of self-promotion to keep Huckabee, Inc. in business for another few years. You can boil down his entire reason for running to a slogan: "Mike Huckabee: Because Who Doesn't Want a Cruel Prick Who Sounds Like a Backwoods Ass Rapist for President?"
Speaking of rape, Huckabee is one of several Republican yahoos running who don't think there should be any exemptions for rape victims when it comes to abortion. Huckabee was asked point blank on CNN about whether or not a 10-year-old rape victim who got pregnant should be able to get an abortion. You gotta give Huckabee credit: When you're a motherfucker, you're a motherfucker all the way:
"I think what we have to do, Dana [Bash], is remember that creating one problem that is horrible -- horrible -- I mean, let nobody be misled. A 10 year-old girl being raped is horrible. But does it solve a problem by taking the life of an innocent child? And that's really the issue."
Putting aside that, while the now-11 year-old girl in Paraguay gave birth by cesarean section, apparently without immediate complications (except for that whole being raped by her stepfather, going through with the pregnancy, and giving birth at 11, for fuck's sake), it was likely that the pre-teen would have extensive issues. Why did her health not matter? Why did her ability to have a life after being raped not matter? Huckabee made a judgment: the fetus was more important than the child who carried it.
Then Huckabee went to the scoundrel's argument about abortion. Hey, you might be aborting a Superman/Mother Theresa hybrid who will cure cancer and save a busload of children from falling off a bridge. "I know people. I worked for a man for several years, James Robison, who was the result of a rape. His mother went to three doctors in Houston, Texas, in 1943, begged doctors to abort the baby. None of them would do it," Huckabee explained. "They all refused. Today, his organization feeds, cares for, and brings living capacity for water to hundreds of thousands of people across the world. That would never have happened, Dana."
The Rude Pundit's said it before and he'll say it again: That's goddamned nonsense. There's also a chance that rape kid could grow up to be Ted Bundy. The possibility that a potentially aborted fetus will grow up to be the world's savior is a fantasy at best, a deliberate, manipulative, bullshit lie at worst. But Huckabee was a TV preacher once, and lying comes easy to a man who looked into poor people's eyes and told them to give him money because he can help them live on a cloud for eternity after they die.
But Huckabee wasn't done. "[L]et's not compound the tragedy by taking yet another life. And I always think we sometimes miss the fact that, when an abortion happens, there are two victims. One is the child. The other is that birth mother, who often will go through extraordinary guilt years later, when she begins to think through the -- what happened with the baby, with her." Except the woman is not a victim. She's a patient who made a choice and is almost guaranteed to live her life satisfied, even happy with that choice. Again and again, Huckabee discounts the agency of women in favor of making them baby-shitting machines.
Finally, Huckabee says the most easily disproved thing: "I just come down on the side that life is precious, every life has worth and value. I don't think we discount the intrinsic worth of any human being. And I don't know where else to go with it, but just to be consistent and say, if life matters and then that's a person, then every life matters." No, every person is not precious. Every life doesn't matter. Everyone doesn't get a trophy for being born, let alone just being conceived. See Ted Bundy remark above for proof.
What we're witnessing is a snake oil salesman talkin' down to the rubes and yokels off the back of his pick-up truck, a charlatan who wants you to know that life is precious as long as men are controlling the lives of women.
