Mike Huckabee

Chris Matthews went off the deep end on Wednesday's Hardball as he accused conservative talk show hosts Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck of demonstrating "ethnic disdain" for the First Family and even charged former Arkansas Governor and current Fox News host Mike Huckabee of wanting to ethnically cleanse Arabs from the West Bank.

Right after a discussion about Republican contenders like John Thune and Chris Christie not entering the presidential race, Matthews told his GOP strategist guest Todd Harris "You are being left with the crazies now" like Huckabee who Matthews charged wants to "clear out all the Arabs in the West Bank, just get rid of them all!...Talk about ethnic cleansing? He says he's gonna do it."

Then Matthews immediately turned to a clip of Rush Limbaugh critiquing Michelle Obama's health push and claimed the talk show host wasn't merely making fun of nanny state politics, but that there was something more sinister involved as he went on to accuse Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and their listeners of being racist, as seen in the following rant:

(video, audio and transcript after the jump)

In an interview with former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee on Tuesday's CBS Early Show, co-host Chris Wragge worried about the fallout from budget cutting in Wisconsin: "It seems to look like this governor [Scott Walker] is trying to basically break unions and that other states may then follow suit. Is this – should unions be on alert all around the country?"

Huckabee pointed out: "I think unions have to get realistic. They can't expect to pay $1 in and get $57 from the state as a pension match. Nobody else gets that." Earlier, Wragge expressed skepticism of Governor's Walker's handling of the issue: "...what you've seen...with the workers and the unions versus Governor Scott Walker and the teacher sick outs, do you think this was handled the best way it possibly could have been?" Huckabee defended Walker: "I think he's got to call attention to the fact that this is a serious issue....You can't borrow money that you can't afford to pay back."

Chris Matthews got another thrill up his leg for Barack Obama Tuesday.

As you read and/or watch the most-recent presidential gushing and fawning from the "Hardball" host, keep telling yourself that this man believes his program is "absolutely nonpartisan" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

New York Magazine's John Heilemann on Friday said the Republican presidential field is the weakest anybody has seen in our lifetime.

This absurd statement was made on the syndicated "Chris Matthews Show" in a segment about which GOPers will be throwing their name into the ring in the coming months before next year's elections (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Mike Huckabee on Sunday demonstrated to his Fox News audience how politically correct, violent rhetoric-free speech can work on television if you try hard enough.

He also showed how absurd it will be if the liberal media reaction to the Tucson shootings goes too far (video follows with transcript and commentary):

It's Christmas Eve, so let's treat ourselves to something conservative political junkies enjoy: handicapping the 2012 Republican field.  

On the Fox News Special Report this evening, panelists Stephen Hayes and Charles Krauthammer both singled out Mitch Daniels as a man to watch.  Hayes identifed  the Indiana gov as perhaps the true Tea Party candidate—someone willing to speak the hard truths about the need for entitlement reform.  Krauthammer counter-intuitively found Daniels' lack of charisma appealing—as an antidote to our overdose of hope-and-change.

View video after the jump.

  Appearing as a guest on Saturday’s Huckabee show on FNC, Whoopi Goldberg - co-host of ABC’s The View - complained that bloggers disseminate inaccurate information about her without the need to "fact check," and that "they poop on you and they walk away." Goldberg: "But a blogger can say endless stuff. They don't have to fact check. ... And then that is picked up and made into some other story on another station, and it becomes the truth. See, I think fact outweighs assumption. So if you have facts in your hands, then you can talk, then you can have a conversation... People just, they poop on you and they walk away."

After asserting that she has said "not one thing" on ABC’s The View that she regrets saying, Goldberg soon added, "And I've gotten flack for what I felt was fact as opposed to someone's speculation."

But Goldberg has her own history of helping spread misinformation on The View. Last May, she and other co-hosts repeated the distorted claims of a left-wing organization in Texas which alleged that conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education were trying to downplay or eliminate references to slavery in its grade school history curriculum. On the Monday, May 17 show, Behar misinformed viewers with sarcasm: "Remember that thing called the 'slave trade'? Remember that? Okay, it turns out, what you learned was all wrong. Because it wasn't some evil buying and selling of human beings. It was simply called 'Atlantic triangular trade.' That's what they want to call it now. It's called revisionism. People do it about the Holocaust, and now Texas wants to do it about our country."

Moments later, Goldberg chimed in, "I’m sorry. Slavery was slavery. You can’t recall it." Instead of reading out the actual wording from the curriculum plan, panel members seemed only to refer to third-party accounts of the proposed changes.

And in April, the panel on the View helped feed the misinformed hysteria over Arizona’s effort to enforce federal immigration laws as some of her co-hosts assumed the new state law would require racial profiling and targeting of Hispanics, failing to convey that Arizona law enforcement would only check immigration documents of suspects who have been detained for some other reason. Goldberg acted more as moderator on this occasion and was not as outspoken as other co-hosts in making assertions about the new law, but she did not challenge the claims of her co-hosts and seemed to assume they were accurate. Goldberg, from the April 26 The View:

 

On Tuesday's CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith interviewed former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and questioned the ability of tea party candidates to be effective in office: "...when it's time to govern, can anger govern? Or better yet, how about this one, if a tug-of-war starts between the tea party folk and the mainstream Republicans, who's going to win that tug-of-war?"  [Audio available here]

Smith played up potential division in the GOP in a previous question: "...a very interesting conundrum for the Republicans....tea party supporters themselves...84% say there is a lot or some difference between them and Republicans. This is not going to be an easy thing to fold in these folks once they get in office."

In response to Smith's "anger" question, Huckabee observed: "Political parties are to serve people, not to lord over them. The Democrats are in trouble because they just went ahead and did what they wanted to do and recklessly and irresponsibly disregarded their bosses."

Appearing as a guest on Saturday’s Huckabee show on FNC, actor Jon Voight condemned Time magazine for the cover on its September 13 issue which provocatively displays the words "Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace" in the middle of a Star of David made from daisies. Voight charged that there must be anti-Semitism at Time magazine if such a cover could be devised. Voight:

Listen, if Israel falls we all fall. Did you see the Time magazine, did you guys see the Time magazine cover? Cover? It was amazing. Here's a cover with a Star of David on it, and it says Israel doesn't care about peace. ... But this is anti-Semitism. This is, who are the anti-Semites who are running Time magazine? And their prior cover, you know, they alluded to the Islamophobia, they're calling America Islamophobic.

As previously documented by NewsBusters, Time managing editor Richard Stengel bizarrely seemed to see a down side to fewer terrorist attacks against Israelis when he appeared on the Thursday, September 2, Morning Joe on MSNBC, as he suggested that it was a "sad truth" that the low level of recent violence from terrorists -- including the "Hamas folks" -- had made Israelis feel less urgency about negotiating with Palestinians. Stengel:

Actor Jon Voight appeared on the August 22 "Huckabee" to discuss, among other things, his conservative activism and the media's misrepresentation of the Tea Party movement.

Here's a sample:

MIKE HUCKABEE: We heard that there were people yelling racial epithets at some of the members of Congress. Did you hear anything like that?

JON VOIGHT:  You know, when you saw this, folks, and you all read these things or you saw them on television, these rumors... are being distributed as truth. And I'm going to tell you  the quality of people that are in the Tea Parties are of such high moral character that if anybody in a group of those people came forth with a racial slur they would be called on the carpet... and they wouldn't stand for it, and we would know their names today. But there's no evidence of any of this, there's no evidence that these things really happened that were portrayed as news.

For interview highlights, check out the video montage we've assembled by clicking the play button in the embed above. Alternately, you can download the MP3 audio here or the WMV video here.

Over the weekend, Dave Weigel resigned as WaPo's house chronicler of conservatives after revelations of his antipathy toward the people he was covering. Tonight brings us the spectacle of Ross Douthat, an ostensibly conservative columnist at the New York Times.  Appearing on MSNBC's Ed Schultz show, Douthat proffered precisely zero criticism of anyone or anything liberal.  But he did manage to mock Mike Huckabee as "passive-aggressive."  For good measure, Douthat suggested that "right-wing" people who question Barack Obama's place of birth are too dense to realize that Hawaii is a state of the union.

The Nation's Chris Hayes, subbing for Schultz tonight, didn't have to strain to elicit criticism of conservatives from Douthat.  After playing a clip of Huckabee stating the apparent fact that he polls better than other Republicans against Obama, Douthat opined.

View video here.

On Saturday’s Huckabee show on FNC, as the show was broadcast from Las Vegas, singer Wayne Newton appeared as a guest to discuss the economic situation in the city, and, when asked by host Mike Huckabee his reaction to President Obama’s remarks from last year attacking businesses for indulging in trips to Las Vegas, Newton did not mince words: "I think that it was the most irresponsible, arrogant thing I have ever heard a President of the United States say."

Fellow guest and Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons related that hundreds of conventions were canceled after the President’s words, costing the city a fortune in lost business: "There's no doubt that the people of Las Vegas, the city of Las Vegas were severely hurt by the President's remarks. About 400 conventions, business meetings, and that were canceled because of his remarks; $100 million was lost by the community at that remark. People lost their jobs. This city took a real blow when the President made that remark. He was wrong then, and then he said it again, and I don't understand why he keeps picking on Las Vegas."

Newton jumped in again and suggested that the President has been hypocritical in holding political fundraisers in Las Vegas: "He was not so incensed with Las Vegas, that he then decided to come here and do two fundraisers."

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Saturday, May 22, Huckabee on FNC:

Jon Voight has written a startling letter to President Obama and the American people that he read on Mike Huckabee's Fox News program Saturday.

"In one year, the American people are witnessing the greatest lie that is cleverly orchestrated by President Obama and his whole administration," he wrote.

"The lie is a potent aggression that feeds the needs of people who either have not educated themselves enough to understand the assault upon us all or the very poor and needy who live to be taken care of."

The letter continued (video follows with full text courtesy Liberty News Online, h/t HotAirPundit, file photo):

Perhaps there is something obstructing the view overlooking Rockefeller Plaza, where MSNBC broadcasts "Countdown" nightly because the show's host, Keith Olbermann fails to see the existence of a news media with a liberal bias.

On MSNBC's Dec. 14 broadcast of "Countdown," Olbermann came to the defense of NBC's "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" executive producer and noted left-winger Dick Wolf. The Dec. 9 episode of Wolf's program featured a killer who targeted the children of illegal immigrants and in that episode, one of the characters, played by John Larroquette, blamed conservatives "like Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck" for inciting violence against immigrants. That prompted O'Reilly on Dec. 10, the next broadcast of the Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor," to fire back at Wolf.

And that led Olbermann to respond to O'Reilly, five days later, which deteriorated into Olbermann making the seemingly laughable assertion there is no such thing as the liberal media. Olbermann began his tirade by attacking Andrew Breitbart, who is launching a Web site called "Big Journalism," which will take on "the Democratic-media complex."

On Saturday’s Fox News Watch, as the panel discussed media coverage of former Republican Governor – and current FNC host – Mike Huckabee’s involvement in commuting the prison sentence of Maurice Clemmons – who would later go on to murder four police officers in Washington state – panel members at first left the impression that Huckabee had commuted Clemmons's sentence after his child rape conviction. (Credit to NewsBusters reader Dana Christianson for emailing in a tip on the matter.) Conservative panelist Jim Pinkerton of New America Foundation had to point out that Huckabee commuted the sentence at a time when Clemmons serving time for the non-violent crime of committing burglary – which he did in 1989 while he was under age 18. Pinkerton even had to directly correct liberal FNC analyst Kirsten Powers, who seemed to convey that she thought Huckabee had commuted the sentence after the child rape conviction:

JIM PINKERTON, NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION: The kid was 17 years old and convicted of nonviolent – not – without a gun burglary and sentenced to 108 years. I think most people would see that as excessive. The real scandal is that he had at least three brushes with the law since the year 2000, and nobody then ever chose to revoke his clemency. That wasn't Mike Huckabee's fault. That was other people.

KIRSTEN POWERS, FNC ANALYST: What about the child rape?

PINKERTON: That was in Washington state.

On Saturday's Huckabee show on FNC, host Mike Huckabee interviewed gameshow host Chuck Woolery, who admitted to being conservative and voiced support for term limits, the Constitution, and tea party protesters. As the segment started, Woolery -- who famously hosted the shows Love Connection, Scrabble, and even the first several years of Wheel of Fortune -- joked: "I'm now sacrificing my career coming out as a conservative. So I'll never be hired in Hollywood again once they find out I'm doing it on your show."

When Huckabee brought up the tea party protests, Woolery spoke approvingly: "It's a grassroots movement, and I think it has legs. I can only pray as a citizen myself that this gains momentum, and people really start to turn on their government."

I can actually remember that Rush Limbaugh's television show in the 1990s once played a clip from Scrabble in which host Woolery admitted to liking Limbaugh after the word "Limbaugh" was revealed as the answer to a word puzzle in which the clue was: "He's been blamed for a lot of bad rush (Rush) hours." Woolery joked that the puzzle was made up by a "pinko commie," and declared, "I like Rush Limbaugh."

Below is a transcript of portions of the interview from the Saturday, November 28, Huckabee show on FNC:

Joe the Plumber was certainly on to something when he got then-candidate Barack Obama to admit he wanted to redistribute the wealth, according to former Republican presidential candidate and Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. 

Huckabee, who now hosts a show aired on the weekends on the Fox News Channel, told "On The Record" host Greta Van Sustren on Nov. 16 that Obama's policies go beyond just the redistribution of wealth, especially on health care. He likened a provision in the House health care bill that would require people to have some sort of health care coverage to a "poll tax."

"[W]hile we really wish [the president's priorities] were recovery, getting jobs back - that's the number one thing we ought to be focused on - but it appears to be redistribution," Huckabee said. "That's what's going on in the health care world, where we're trying to make sure that we've redistributed health care, taking it from people who have it, taking from them, giving it to people who may not even desire to have it, and forcing people into an unconstitutional system where they're going to have to virtually pay into a private marketplace in order to get full rights of citizenship. It's the equivalent of a poll tax."

On Saturday’s Huckabee show on FNC, host Mike Huckabee interviewed the former executive director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan Texas, Abby Johnson, who became a pro-life activist after witnessing an ultrasound of an abortion while she assisted in a procedure. She charged that the abortion provider tries to "increase the number of abortions they do" for the purpose of making money, and described the emotional experience of watching an unborn baby at 13 weeks pregnancy "trying to get away" as its life was being ended. Video of the interview can be found here.

Johnson: "I saw the probe going into the woman's uterus. And at that moment, I saw the baby moving and trying to get away from the probe. ... And I thought, 'It's fighting for its life.' And I thought, 'It's life, I mean, it's alive.'"

She soon continued:

Conservative author Ann Coulter was Mike Huckabee's guest on Fox News Saturday, and the pair had a very interesting and entertaining discussion about the media's coverage of Sarah Palin as well as differences of opinion between the two of them during last year's Republican primaries.

As Coulter fans are aware, she was not a Huckabee supporter during the 2008 campaign. Far from it, she was one of his strongest critics as Hot Air's Allahpundit pointed out Sunday.

Despite this, Huckabee was quite the professional, and an exceedingly gracious host (video embedded below the fold, file photo):

Mollie at the Get Religion blog reports that the Obama campaign is circulating a pamphlet in Kentucky with Barack Obama standing in the pulpit with a gleaming cross behind him, and she wonders where all the media fuss is, compared to the hoots and hollers when Mike Huckabee put a slightly subliminal cross image in one ad and said he was a "Christian Leader" in another. On Thursday, the Washington Post ran a brief item:

The pamphlet has circulated in other primary states and is striking for its overt appeal on religion. The words across the top read “Faith. Hope. Change.” Obama is pictured at a church pulpit, with a large illuminated cross in the background. A quote at the bottom reads: “My faith teaches me that I can sit in church and pray all I want, but I won’t be fulfilling God’s will unless I go out and do the Lord’s work.”

Post reporter Shailagh Murray mentioned the campaign is seeking "to counteract the persistent and false belief held by some voters that Obama is Muslim," and to avoid a loss as wide as the one in West Virginia. But she makes no mention of Trinity United Church of Christ or Jeremiah Wright.

If you haven't been asleep or out of the country the past seven days, you are fully aware of two rather controversial skits performed last Saturday on NBC's "Saturday Night Live."

In one, CNN Democrat debate moderators were depicted, "like nearly everyone in the news media," as being "totally in the tank for Senator Obama." Later, host Tina Fey basically gave a campaign speech for Hillary Clinton.

Videos of these skits began appearing at YouTube almost as soon as they were performed on the East Coast. Apparently for copyright infringement reasons, these unauthorized videos were pulled, sometimes within hours of them being posted.

Yet, as suggested by NewsBusters reader Myron Howard, there appears to be a political element at play for this clip from Saturday's show featuring Republican candidate Mike Huckabee was posted at YouTube on Sunday, and has not been removed:

I guess hate is "More Than a Feeling" for aging rocker Tom Scholz, former member of the band Boston. Scholz, it appears, is none too happy that presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was using his old Boston tune,"More Than a Feeling" on the campaign trail and he wants him to stop it.

Like John Mellencamp -- who got his leather pants in a bunch over McCain's usage of one of his pop tunes -- Mr. Scholz is another musician who imagines that people are so stupid that when they hear a song at a campaign rally, they must automatically imagine that the producer of the song supports the candidate in question.

As reported by the AP, Scholz sent a letter to the Huckabee campaign telling Huckabee to dump the song and Don't Look Back.

Women faint around him, and his message of hope and change are moving the mountains of Clinton inevitability. Now his wife tells us that he is the only one that can "fix American souls".

We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another — that we cannot measure the greatness of our society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure our greatness by the least of these. That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that. That before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.

Sometimes a paper puts out an editorial that is so absurd that it makes your head spin. The Las Vegas Sun wins the prize this week for a surreal ability to read something into nothing. The Sun took Mitt Romney's CPAC concession speech and turned it from a gracious and inspiring address into a screed where the Sun amazingly heard Romney call Mike Huckabee a terrorist! It just makes ya go "HUH?"

In an unsigned editorial, the Sun gives us "Romney's twisted world," but it seems to me that what is twisted is the mind of the Sun editorial board. To have gotten the interpretation they got out of Romney's speech is one for the ages, but they are positive, it seems, that what Romney said is "dangerously irresponsible."

The media loves campaign metaphors. Yesterday, some MSM wag delighted in pointing out that Mike Huckabee's campaign van had twice run out of gas. Today, it was Hillary Clinton's turn. In the wake of her devastating defeats in the Potomac primaries, Good Morning America rolled an extended clip of her struggling up an airplane stairway.

Speaking with Diane Sawyer, George Stephanopoulos had just finished opining that if in Texas Obama cuts into Hillary's coalition of women and Hispanics the way he did last night, he will be the nominee.

Call it Today's homage to John Lennon: imagine there're no conservatives. The NBC show so much enjoyed the conservative-free citizens panel it hosted back in November that it brought it back this morning.

As I wrote about at the time, two timid Republicans were pitted against two partisan Dems. In November, one of the "Republicans," Susie O'Neil, claimed that the country is in decline due to the war "and because corporations are totally influencing our Members of Congress and the Senate." Call Susie a Michael Moore Republican.

The other Republican on the panel back then, Sarah Hungerford, said she was thinking of voting for . . . a Democrat. The pair were back this morning, again matched against two partisan Dems who both had apparently become Obama supporters.

View video here.

Imagine campaign events happening in 22 states at the same time, and that at such contests, two liberals, two conservatives, and one moderate candidate are vying for the public's votes.

You would expect the words "liberal" and "conservative" to be equally interspersed in media coverage of these events if indeed press outlets were impartial, right?

Well, count MSNBC out of this logical calculus, for on Tuesday evening, the unabashedly left-leaning cable news network actually used the word "conservative" tens times as much as "liberal."

In fact, the actual tally for these descriptives during MSNBC's Super Tuesday primary coverage was (h/t NBer Gary Hall):

Mike Huckabee won five races last night. Mitt Romney won seven. Mike Huckabee has 190 delegates. Mitt Romney has 269 [see results here]. The only closed Deep South state left on the primary calendar is Mississippi. Romney has the message and money to compete across the USA.

So when Huckabee claims it's now a two-man race between McCain and himself, a journalist would surely challenge him on it, no? No. Not Robin Roberts, at least. To the contrary, she bought into his logic to the extent of asking only about his strategy going forward.

There were also some intriguing comments from Huckabee about allegations of backroom West Virginia deals and the importance of politesse . . .

View video here.