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Friday, May 16, 2008

Mike Huckabee Was the Funny One, Right?

posted by on May 16 at 13:56 PM

Somebody pointing a gun at Barack Obama—hilarious!

During a speech before the National Rifle Association convention Friday afternoon in Louisville, Kentucky, former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee—who has endorsed presumptive GOP nominee John McCain—joked that an unexpected offstage noise was Democrat Barack Obama looking to avoid a gunman.

“That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he’s getting ready to speak,” said the former Arkansas governor, to audience laughter. “Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor.”

RSS icon Comments

1

Durr.

Posted by Mr. Poe | May 16, 2008 2:03 PM
2

Those Christians, so damn classy!!! Well at least the Baptist Preachers are.

Posted by Cato the Younger Younger | May 16, 2008 2:06 PM
3

I took Huckabee's joke and tried it with a variety of names ... nope, not funny then either.

Perhaps it would be funny from his pulpit? Oh wait! The NRA is pretty much his pulpit. heh

Posted by Auric | May 16, 2008 2:07 PM
4

Wow, that is so incredibly tasteless, so far away from funny. If someone put a bullet in Huckabee, at least we know we wouldn't be losing a great sense of humor.

Posted by Hernandez | May 16, 2008 2:14 PM
5

It's amazing how touchy those nigras get when you pull a gun on 'em....

And another thing? No sense of humor about it, either!

Posted by NapoleonXIV | May 16, 2008 2:15 PM
6

But Kentucky isn't even in the Deep South... they still think it's funny to shoot black people?

I can't wait for them to secede again.

Posted by iflurry | May 16, 2008 2:26 PM
7

You know, it's fun to bash Huckabee, and he'd be a disastrous president, but he came out pretty strongly to defend Obama when the whole Rev. Wright thing went down.

Posted by MHD | May 16, 2008 2:27 PM
8

Bet it got a hoot-and-hollering round of applause at the NRA meeting though - which, if true, says volumes about the fucking NRA.

If the statement had been about President Doofus, Huckabee might have been strung up from the highest rafter and/or the NRA might have been deemed a terrorist organization by the government.

Posted by Bauhaus | May 16, 2008 2:30 PM
9

@6:
Are you assuming they laughed because of Obama's race? I mean it is possible they are racist, but that's hardly the only thing that could lead them to laugh (assuming anyone actually laughed). Perhaps rather than racists they are just assholes who think the idea of pointing a gun at someone they don't agree with is funny.

Posted by Ryan | May 16, 2008 2:32 PM
10

HEY!! #6!!! Maybe when Obama wins the south WILL secede?!?! That would be great! AND no war this time, they can just go off on their own no questions asked.

I am TOTALLY looking at this election in a new light!!

Posted by Cato the Younger Younger | May 16, 2008 2:34 PM
11

@6,

Kentucky didn't secede.


This joke is particularly unfunny considering our not so recent history of racist fucks assassinating prominent African Americans.

Posted by keshmeshi | May 16, 2008 2:59 PM
12

The laughter proves how politicized the NRA has become. It's funny even though it celebrates the violation of the very gun-safety principles they're always crowing about. And Huckabee is not just a Christian but a preacher. Sick, demented fuckheads.

PLEASE pick him for veep, McCain.

Posted by Fnarf | May 16, 2008 3:08 PM
13

Wow. That is so far beyond not okay... hell, it might even be grounds for a civil suit, for all I know.

Posted by Greg | May 16, 2008 3:17 PM
14

Oh, Huck, har-tee-har-har! Aiming guns at Presidential candidates! Who happen to be Democrats! And black! Next thing you know, a Very Serious Pundit will be writing an op-ed in the New York Times about beheading Obama because he is a Muslim apostate! Oh, wait, someone already did!

Posted by bobbo | May 16, 2008 3:18 PM
15

According to the AP story posted less than an hour ago: "There were only a few murmurs in the crowd after the remark."

As much as I despise defending anyone even remotely affiliated with the NRA, I had to at least clarify that no one seems to have laughed at this ridiculous comment.

Posted by Chilly | May 16, 2008 3:46 PM
16

@10: That would be their Constitutional right...as it was in 1860. I'm hoping for Florida and Texas to secede as soon as they possibly can.

Posted by Gabe | May 16, 2008 3:58 PM
17

This is much ado about nothing.

Posted by Jason Josephes | May 16, 2008 4:21 PM
18

@ 6:

Kentucky WAS a slave state, but no, they didn't secede. They stuck with the non-slave states. They've always been a really odd mix of "we want to be north" and "we want to be south." Before the Civil War they were a slave state.

They're not far enough up to be northern, but they're also not far enough down to be southern.

I lived in Lexington (SE Kentucky) for a period, and I can tell you they were pretty intolerant. Non-acceptance of Obama--who is HALF WHITE after all--does not surprise me one iota.

Posted by Wolf | May 16, 2008 5:13 PM
19

@17 - well, yeah, the GOP is nothing, but they're still slime.

Posted by Will in Seattle | May 16, 2008 5:37 PM
20

@15: Yeah, I noticed that sentence in the AP story too ("There were only a few murmurs in the crowd after the remark.")

But if you watch/listen to the video, you hear more than a few murmurs.

Huckbee says "...he's getting ready to speak" and he gets bunch of laughs and some claps. The crowd is quiet while he then says "Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor." And then you definitely hear laughter after that line. Maybe not as much laugher as after the first line, but it's more than "a few murmurs."

Posted by stinkbug | May 16, 2008 5:46 PM
21

Considering that my eagerness to have Obama as president is only matched by my worry that some nutjob will try to kill him, that definitely wasn't funny.

And it reminded me of RFK's assasination, off-stage after a speech.

Posted by Lesley | May 16, 2008 7:01 PM
22

I think Obama should definitely pick a non-straight white man for running mate specifically because of jokes like these made by straight white guys. If not Hillary (and she's blown it) then Richardson or someone african american, latino, latina, someone someone someone someone else.

Posted by sheila | May 17, 2008 6:47 AM
23

@11, @6,
yup Kentucky didn't secede. And it was a slave state. But they didn't have many. It was largely smaller land holdings, descendants of the Scotch Irish Daniel Boone types -- not huge slave plantation owners.

MD DE and DC also had slaves but did not join the Confederacy. In part because of the federal troops in DC.

Slaves in DC built the US Capitol in fact.

Today, their descendants living in DC can't even vote for the folks making the laws inside the Capitol.

But as folks across the USA actually care very little about real deprivations of rights, including the deprivation of voting rights for DC residents, who are largely African Americans, no one talks about that. Instead we all talk about who made what ill mannered "joke" or who said what without properly crediting someone else and we spend a lot of time analyzing all these words for taints of racism.

But actual voting rights, for a few hundred thousand actual black people in DC?

Eh. No one outside DC actually gives a shit.


Posted by PC | May 17, 2008 10:47 AM
24

keep it up mike. keep shooting your party in the ass.

@6: kentucky is as full of ignorant rubes just as sure as any state in the "deep south". i lived across the ohio from it for 28 years.

i wish these crackers would put down the meth for half a second & realize that obama is the least 'black' black candidate they're ever going to see. it is not possible to create a black man more white. he grew up in fucking hawaii, not in some crumbling louisville or cincinnati ghetto shithole.

considering the persistence of the "muslim" meme, i'm not holding my breath.

Posted by maxsolomon@home | May 17, 2008 12:02 PM
25

#24

Interestingly, from where I sit in Louisville, I've found that everything directly across the river (at least from Cincy on down to IN) is more full of rubes (and more racist) than the part I live in.

Posted by Prometheusnox | May 18, 2008 9:13 PM
26

I'm going to go out on a devil's advocate's limb and speculate that Huckabee was making fun of his audience, suggesting that those NRA folks just can't keep their fingers off the triggers. The joke was clearly not funny, but since Huckabee gave a national take on the Rev. Wright issue that was more logical than that of any pundit, I'm willing to give his intentions the benefit of the doubt. At least for a little while.

Posted by Mary F | May 19, 2008 6:58 AM

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