I'm just a Huck, a Huck of burning love

(image by the illustrious darkblack)

Steve Benen at Washington Monthly has a good round-up of the hackery of the Huckabeast:

Earlier this month, he didn't know what the National Intelligence Estimate was. A week later, the former governor identified Thomas Friedman and Frank Gaffney as his biggest influences on foreign policy, despite the fact that Friedman and Gaffney don't actually agree on anything.

This week, any shred of credibility Huckabee maintained on foreign policy quickly vanished. In the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto's assassination, the Arkansan's first reaction was to argue that the slaying should lead to a reevaluation of U.S. immigration policy. Of course, the assertion didn't make any sense.

Indeed, it's been a particularly embarrassing couple of days for Huckabee. He argued that "we have more Pakistani illegals" entering the U.S. than any other nationality, aside from Mexico. That's not even close to being true. He said the Pakistani government "does not have enough control of those eastern borders near Afghanistan to be able go after the terrorists." He meant western borders.

It's often said the politicians should be judged not on what crap they spin on the campaign trail, but rather on what they have actually done. And that applies as well to Huckabee. Here's what he did in Arkansas:

It all began 16 years ago for Mike and me. Huckabee, in his political debut, was preparing to become the Bible-thumping, abortion-decrying Republican challenger to U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers, the Democratic incumbent. With a playbook straight out of James Dobson, he tried to portray Bumpers as a pornographer for his support of federal grants to the arts.

More important, Huckabee revealed an enduring weakness as glaring as that other Arkansas governor's fondness for women. Huckabee seems to love loot and has a dismissive attitude toward ethics, campaign finance rules and propriety in general. Since that first, failed campaign, the ethical questions have multiplied.

In the 1992 contest with Bumpers, Huckabee used campaign funds to pay himself as his own media consultant. Other payments went to the family babysitter.

In his successful 1994 run for lieutenant governor, he set up a nonprofit curtain known as Action America so he could give speeches for money without having to disclose the names of his benefactors. He failed to report that campaign travel payments were for the use of his own personal plane.

After he became governor in 1996, he raked in tens of thousands of dollars in gifts, including gifts from people he later appointed to prestigious state commissions.

In the governor's office, his grasp never exceeded his reach. Furniture he'd received to doll up his office was carted out with him when he left, after he'd crushed computer hard drives so nobody could ever get a peek behind the curtain of the Huckabee administration.

So there's your conservative champion of Family Values™, in actuality a modern-day Boss Tweed. Read the whole thing. This is they guy the fundamentalist/evangelical part of the Right-wing wants in the top job.

Bastard.