I confess. Once upon a time, I thought Mike Huckabee seemed like a nice guy. Granted, I disagreed with him on just about every issue imaginable. I thought he was misinformed, kind of crazy, totally wrong on all issues LGBT, but still he seemed like he wasn’t a bad person.
That was years ago. The Mike Huckabee of today? He’s doing a fine job proving that he is, in fact, terrible. Whether he’s changed over the years or has been terrible all along, I don’t know. All I know is that Huckabee has apparently caught on that only openly hateful Republicans have a chance in this country.
Case in point: a “joke” he made earlier this year while speaking at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention at the expense of transgender folks.
He set up the “joke” with the premise that trannies lurk in bathrooms, presumably to molest kids.
“We are now, in city after city, watching ordinances say that your 7-year-old daughter, if she goes into the restroom, cannot be offended and you can’t be offended if she’s greeted there by a 42-year-old man who feels more like a woman than he does a man,” Huckabee says, apparently under the belief that the word “transgender” means a fleeting feeling that comes and goes from day to day depending on whether you want to watch 7-year-olds pee or not.
And then comes Huckabee’s big punch line: “Now I wish that someone told me when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE. I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.’”
Ha ha times infinity. Are you laughing so hard right now? Because the audience totally was.
“You’re laughing because it sounds so ridiculous, doesn’t it?” he says to the audience. Um, no. That’s not why they’re laughing. They’re laughing because they’re idiots.
Because as far as Huckabee’s joke construction goes, this is not a “Can you even imagine it?” kind of joke. Huckabee isn’t presenting some hypothetical example; he’s basically using his ignorance of the transgender experience to tell us how desperate he was to see titties in high school. Granted, teenage boys wanting to see naked girls is not new or novel. But remember that Huckabee set up his bit explaining that transgender folks were sex-crime perverts. And then he essentially says, “Man, I wish I could have gotten away with being a sex-crime pervert in high school.” Granted, he might not consciously mean that. But that’s what his little comedy bit translates to.
In case you were wondering, Huckabee stands by the “joke.”
“I take nothing back from that speech,” he told right-wing radio host Steve Deace on June 5. “I’m giving a common-sense answer to the insanity that’s going on out there because I hear people. Everybody wants to be politically correct, everybody wants to be loved by the media and loved by the left and loved by the elitists. But, you know, I know I’m not going to be, so let’s just get it over with.”
Yes. Let’s just get the Mr. Nice Guy thing over with. Why be “politically correct” and loved by people who use critical-thinking skills when you can pander to the most hateful, delusional and ignorant voters in America? Hey, you’ve gotta please that GOP base.