By Alan Bean
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Mark 8:36
Last Thursday, potential presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee assured Stephen Colbert that Barack Obama is a Christian, not a Muslim (as 31% of Republicans believe). An encouraging sign, don’t you think? It’s nice to know that the leading Republican candidate in the South sides with the sane two-thirds of his party on this important issue.
Then, four days later, Mr. Huckabee informed a conservative radio talk show host that Obama was raised in Kenya and that anti-imperialistic stories about the Mau-Mau uprising in the early 1950s, imbibed from his father and grandfather, likely account for the president’s liberal politics.
Huckabee didn’t actually endorse the “birther” myth (embraced by 51% of Republicans), but he might as well have.
After the show, the former Arkansas governor was informed that Mr. Obama grew up in the American state of Hawaii, and spent a brief slice of his childhood in Indonesia, not Kenya.
Huckabee winced and said he had misspoken. But did he? (How many Mau-Mau’s have you ever seen in Indonesia? Be honest now.)
Imagine that the numbers flipped and only 31% of Republicans believed that Obama was born outside the United States, while 51% mistook him for a Muslim. Would the presidential hopeful have summoned the courage to buck the majority view in his own party? Mr. Huckabee is particularly popular in the South where, one assumes, a strong majority of Republicans accept the birther myth and the president’s punctilious adherence to Islam is beyond controversy. Would the cool Republican with the bass guitar flout party orthodoxy out of sheer integrity?
Let me put the question a different way. Imagine that Satan spirited Mike Huckabee to the pinnacle of the White House and told him he could have the Republican presidential nomination on one condition–he had to publicly express his disdain for common sense and people of color. Would Mike take the deal?
Unfortunately, we already have our answer.
Friends of Justice 
There’s an op. ed. in NYT this morning (3/4) that treats the Kenya thing as well as Huck’s pardon of an Arkansas inmate who went on to murder four policemen while they were drinking coffee. Huck prevaricated about the inmate’s previous record, and about his record in prison. Egan (the editorialist) assaults not only Huck’s penchant for stretching the truth if not outright lying, but also his judgment. As a good Baptist minister, Huck was hooked by the prisoner’s claim to have met Jesus. This one will be harder for him to live down than some of the other stuff.