The Washington Post decided to spice up their thin Monday newspaper with a shameless blast of opposition research at a Republican presidential contender. The headline was “81 THINGS MIKE HUCKABEE HAS DENOUNCED: A catalogue of gripes spanning 40 years, straight from the Republican’s mouth.”
Before you read any further, you know it’s the liberal Post mocking a social conservative, and you cannot imagine how they would ever publish an article on the 81 things Hillary Clinton has denounced. You can imagine they’re shameless enough to avoid Bernie Sanders expounding on women wanting rape from 1972 (except for one online nod), but quote Huckabee extensively from 1973 and 1974.
The author and compiler of this oppo exercise is Post reporter David Fahrenthold, who saves his journalistic cotton candy for libertine leftists like Sandra Fluke.
This is not an article, just a list, designed to embarrass. He began with Huckabee's writings from when he was 18:
1.) Dancing, in general. "Christian teens stay away." (1973)
He linked to a Buzzfeed article on Huckabee’s "RAPture Express" newspaper column on Christian topics for a paper called the Baptist Trumpet. It's a very close analogue to the newspaper writing of Sanders on sex.
Fahrenthold enjoys finding Huckabee having two different views, (you know, like Hillary and Barack on gay marriage):
12.) Republicans who criticize President Obama constantly. "It's hypocritical..to question every motive of Barack Obama." (2009)
13.) President Obama, for bowing too low when he met the Emperor of Japan. "That deep bow, to the waist ... was offensive to me." (2009, spoken roughly 50 seconds after #12).
And:
15.) Biscuits and gravy. "My mortal enemy." (2007, after Huckabee's major weight loss)
16.) Restaurants that don't serve biscuits and gravy. "How can an eating place that fancies itself fancy...not have biscuits and gravy?" (2015, in his book God, Guns, Grits and Gravy.).
The official Huckabee response to this blatant journalistic attack is next:
17.) This list, which is an annotated catalog of things and people that Huckabee has over the last four decades decried as unwise, unhealthy, un-conservative, un-Biblical or un-American. It runs to 81 items. Which is not all of them. But it's enough to show the risk of a life spent passing moral judgments for political gain. "Governor is hard at work on the campaign trail today, talking to the people of Iowa about issues that are important to them...If you have a question about that, please let me know." (2015, from a spokeswoman for Huckabee's 2016 presidential campaign spokeswoman, describing why Huckabee would not talk about the list.)
So in the secular leftist environs of the Post, it's risky to spend a life "passing moral judgments for political gain." But what about moral judgments about say, greed? Couldn't they compile 81 quotes of Hillary Clinton denouncing rapacious greed next to her actual behavior in building a massive personal fortune with her husband? They could, but they're a Democratic rag.
As for teenaged behavior worth mocking, one last point: The Washington Post that mocks teenage Baptist Trumpet columnist Huckabee thinks Obama's enthusiastic teenage pot smoking in the "Choom Gang" is much more like their youth, so it was spun like this by Post editor David Maraniss deep in a Sports section article: "If there is a representative teenager's life, Barry Obama lived a version of it in Hawaii in the late 1970s."
Earlier: Mike Huckabee vs. Beyonce
