What About Mike Huckabee? Sarah Palin?

Dear Madame L,

Okay, maybe you have a longer memory than me (plus you were born so long ago!) and so you remember all those things about Newt Gingrich that someone like me never even knew.

But what do you think of Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin as Republican candidates in the 2012 presidential election?

Sincerely,

Don't Know How To Vote

Dear Don't Know How,

First, here's how to vote: go into the polling place and sign in, wait in line until it's your turn, and then go into the booth and read the instructions, and vote. It's really easy.

Or, if you live in a state where you can vote by mail, it's even easier: the election commission sends you everything you need, and you vote.

Sorry, Madame L couldn't resist.

As for Mike Huckabee: No, and double no. He's a liar and a deceiver. He has even claimed that President Obama was raised in Kenya, that he was influenced by his grandfather's (supposed) involvement in the Mau Mau revolt to think differently about politics than the rest of us "true" Americans do, and that he's not as solid-apple-pie American as most "real" Americans, in part because he didn't go to Boy Scouts when he was a kid and also because he attended a "madrassa" instead of a "real" school.

So, Mikey is not quite a Birther. Madame L hereby invents her own term for Huckabee et alia: an Aliener: someone who, for purely selfish political reasons finds it convenient to use conservative code words to exclude our President from the mainstream in order to give ignorant and small-minded xenophobes and racists an excuse to dismiss him.

When Huckabee and other Alieners can't do that with the truth, they make things up; thus, ignorance safely maintained, the deceived feel safe in voting for someone like the former governor (who by the way hasn't even declared his candidacy, and may not, because he's currently making so much money as a conservative pundit).

President Obama was born in Hawaii raised by his American mother there and in Indonesia, where he attended a Catholic school at first and then a government-run school ("madrasah," which is the Arabic word for "school" and in that context has no religious or political significance). Later he lived with his grandparents in Hawaii while his mother continued her work as an anthropologist in Indonesia.

President Obama's father was born in Kenya, as was his paternal grandfather. His paternal grandfather was arrested by the British before the Mau Mau revolution and his family was not affected by anti-British sentiment because of the revolution (or anything else).

President Obama did not "insult the British government" by returning a bust of Winston Churchill to them, another lie Huckabee has repeated. The bust was on loan to the Bush administration, was scheduled to be returned before Obama took office, and was returned in due course and now sits somewhere in the British ambassador's residence.

Preisdent Obama replaced it with a bust of Abraham Lincoln --- Madame Elle hopes Huckabee isn't going to make hay out of that! --- and keeps in the Oval Office the desk made of timbers from HMS Resolute and other British artifacts.

There's more: Madame L wonders where Mike Huckabee got the idea that most Americans have belonged to the Boy Scouts. Madame L, along with every girl and woman in America, hasn't belonged to that organization, and neither have more than half of all American boys. Yet President Obama IS the honorary president of the Boy Scouts, DOES sign Eagle Scout certificates and life-saving awards, and so on. To those who are offended because President Obama had more important things to do than to attend some Boy Scout celebration last year, Madame L notes that if he had attended that celebration, those same people probably would have complained that he should be attending to more serious matters.

Here's an interesting comment on why Mike Huckabee may come to regret his insinuations about Barack Obama.

About Sarah Palin, former half-term governor of Alaska, Madame L will have much to say. Tomorrow.

Thanks for asking, and for thinking about your vote,

Madame L