Huckabee Pulls a Palin

Thursday morning, Mike Huckabee criticized Democrats for using Ted Kennedy’s memory to promote health care reform:

“Sen. Ted Kennedy’s death had barely hit the news before we started hearing calls that Congress must hurry and pass the health care reform bill and do it in his memory,” said Huckabee. “That not only defies good taste, it defies logic. We certainly can and should respect his years of advocacy and work for the things that he truly believed in. But there is no good reason to rush through a giant unread bill that would transform American health care and impact every citizen.”

Huckabee didn’t have any qualms about using Kennedy’s name to spread misinformation:

The 2008 Republican presidential candidate suggested during his radio show, “The Huckabee Report,” on Thursday that, under President Obama’s health care plan, Kennedy would have been told to “go home to take pain pills and die” during his last year of life.

“[I]t was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don’t have as long to live might want to consider just taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them,” said Huckabee. “Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not. He freely did what most of us would do. He choose an expensive operation and painful follow up treatments. He saw his work as vitally important and so he fought for every minute he could stay on this earth doing it. He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for.”

Of course this is totally untrue. The proposed legislation prohibits discrimination based upon age and Kennedy would receive the same care regardless of his age.

George Stephanopoulos considered the political aspects of this:

One thing’s for sure: by joining the debate in this time in this way, Huckabee is showing how determined he is not to be outmaneuvered by Sarah Palin in the early 2012 bidding for the GOP’s conservative base.

In other words, to appeal to the conservative base it is necessary to invent false claims as ridiculous as those being spread by Sarah Palin.

1 Comment

  1. 1
    Eclectic Radical says:

    I keep intending (because one of my best friends lives in Ashqelon) to write about Huckabee’s recent round of idiocy in Jerusalem and I keep forgetting.
     
    While Huckabee is a nice guy with a cool sense of humor and some reasonably intelligent ideas about welfare policy (compared to the rest of his party), he is utterly ignorant of foreign policy or political science. His ignorance is on a horrifying level, that is perhaps beyond even Palin’s… because he professes an experience and education he does not possess, whereas Palin is proud of her ignorance and inexperience.
     

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