I was going to ignore this, but maybe there’s no harm in this bile being highlighted?? And this man is supposedly a ‘rational’ and ‘moderate’ Republican?
CBS: In a radio interview on Monday, potential 2012 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee repeatedly made false claims that President Obama grew up in Kenya.
A spokesman for Huckabee later told CBS News that the former Arkansas governor misspoke.
….Huckabee made reference to Mr. Obama’s “having grown up in Kenya” and spoke of him growing up “with a Kenyan father and grandfather” - despite the fact that Mr. Obama grew up largely in Hawaii and barely knew his father at all.
In responding to Malzberg’s question about whether “we deserve to know more about this man” and his origins, Huckabee responded that “I would love to know more.”
“What I know is troubling enough,” Huckabee said of the president. “And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American.” The exchange was circulated by liberal media watchdog Media Matters.
A spokesman for Huckabee later said the former governor “meant to say the President grew up in Indonesia.”
“When the Governor mentioned he wanted to know more about the President, he wasn’t talking about the President’s place of birth - the Governor believes the President was born in Hawaii,” Hogan Gidley said in a statement to CBS News….
…There is no evidence that the president grew up in Kenya, and various reports show he spent little time with his father over the course of his life… Mr. Obama has visited Kenya only three times, most recently in 2006. According to the president’s 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” he visited Kenya for the first time in the late 1980s after his father was already dead.
…When asked if he would bring up the “birther” issue with Mr. Obama in a presidential debate, Huckabee expressed doubts. “The only reason I’m not as confident that there’s something about the birth certificate, Steve, is because I know the Clintons,” Huckabee said. “And believe me, they had lots of investigators out on him, and I’m convinced if there was anything that they could have found on that, they would have found it, and I promise they would have used it.”
Read more here
From Media Matters - on the claim that Huckabee ‘misspoke’ and that he meant to say Indonesia:
“Here are just a couple reasons why subbing “Indonesia” for “Kenya” renders Huckabee’s entire conversation with Malzberg nonsensical (well, more so):
* It’s unclear how growing up in Indonesia supposedly gave Obama a unique view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya (and resulting deep-seated hatred for British people). *Regardless of where he grew up, Obama still did not grow up “with” his Kenyan father. As revealed in the autobiography Huckabee has clearly never read, Obama only met his father once, when he was ten. *And once again: it’s very hard to buy that this was simply a misstatement, because he repeated it twice.
Keep digging, Mike.”
Stephen Stromberg (Washington Post): ….Huckabee says he misspoke when he repeatedly claimed that President Obama grew up in Kenya and that this might inform the president’s views on foreign affairs. And the depressing thing is that Huckabee’s probably telling the truth.
…This episode demonstrates something more pernicious than the existence of one more Obama conspiracy theorist. It demonstrates the extent to which references to birther-like mythology - and its less-offensive-but-still-pretty-absurd cousin, the Dinesh D’Souza-inspired speculations about Obama’s “Kenyan, anti-colonial worldview” - have become embedded in conservative political culture.
It demonstrates the extent to which Republican politicians feel the need to indulge the portions of the GOP base for whom Obama’s “Kenyan” roots matter - whether by asking for his birth certificate or merely suggesting that this man, who has in many ways lived a quintessentially American life, is nothing like the rest of us in some fundamental, worryingly foreign way.
White House.gov
