Huckabee 'Jokes' (Again) About Voter Suppression
October 17, 2011
While campaigning in favor of Issue 2 in Ohio (the referendum forced onto the ballot by voters in an attempt to veto the
GOP bill that strips public unions of many collective bargaining rights), hilarious former Arkansas Governor and 2008
Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee encouraged supporters to suppress the votes of opponents...
"Make a list… Call them and ask them, 'Are you going to vote on Issue 2 and are you going to vote for it?' If they say
no, well, you just make sure that they don't go vote. Let the air out of their tires on election day. Tell them the
election has been moved to a different date. That's up to you how you creatively get the job done."
Hilarious stuff. Particularly in Ohio. As Comedy Central's Dennis DiClaudio pointed out, "if any person who ever voted for a Democrat ever got within a 70-yard radius of a microphone and made a joke even
slightly similar to that one, Andrew Breitbart would spend a long weekend foaming at the mouth in the video bay
attempting to edit down footage of the guy into something that made him look like he murdered Ronald Reagan, and James
O'Keefe would be trying to seduce him in front of a hidden camera with a salame."
But, ya know, IOKIYAR.
But it's not the first time Huckabee --- now a host of a weekly show on Fox "News," a cable channel that pretends to
care about "voter fraud," but only when they can trick viewers into believe it's being performed by Democrats --- has
told the same bad "joke." As we reported in April of 2009, he used the exact same voter-suppression hilarity while stumping for Virginia's then Republican gubernatorial
candidate Bob McDonnell...
Huck's "joke" worked last time. Despite McDonnell's Democratic opponent responding with a letter describing the matter as "no joking matter," noting, "People died for the right to vote in this country, and we have to
protect it," McDonnell reportedly won the election. So why not encourage the same unlawfulness this time, eh?
Paul Weyrich --- the legendary rightwing demi-god, GOP godfather of modern day voter-suppression and founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the rightwing organization which literally drafted the
templates used by GOP legislatures across the nation over the past year to pass all manner of voter-suppression bills set to affect some 5 million largely Democratic-leaning voters in 2012 --- would be proud. Perhaps Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, was amongst those at the Dallas convention of Baptist
ministers in 1980 where Weyrich lectured from the podium --- next to good Christians like Jerry Falwell and Ronald
Reagan --- on how keeping people from participating in their own democracy was a perfectly acceptable tactic to help
Republicans win elections...
ENDS