Mike Huckabee, Fox News commentator and former governor of Arkansas: I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough. And one thing that I do know is, his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, is very different than the average American. When he gave the bust back to the Brits …
Radio host Steve Malzberg: Of Winston Churchill.
Mr. Huckabee: The bust of Winston Churchill, a great insult to the British. But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours, because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.
A conversation like this one, on the Steve Malzberg radio show this past Monday, is so rich in idiocy that it almost feels as if we should leave a portion of it to be excavated by another generation. To begin with, Barack Obama wasn't raised in Kenya. Mr. Obama didn't even visit Kenya until he was in his 20s. He was also, rather famously, not raised by his Kenyan father, let alone his Kenyan grandfather.
Mr. Obama did live in Indonesia from the ages of 6 to 10, with his mother, but he was born and raised mainly in Hawaii. It's
curious that the Obama-is-unknowable-because-his-alien-upbringing-made-him-anti-imperialist meme, explored by Dinesh D'Souza in Forbes early last year and picked up with childlike glee by Newt Gingrich and others, traces the origin of Mr. Obama's alleged anti-imperialist radicalism to Mr. Obama's-time-not-spent-growing-up-in-Kenya, rather than his time-actually-spent-growing-up-in-Hawaii – the newest of America's 50 states, with a complex history of its own.
Or perhaps from the larger fact that Mr. Obama is an American.
If Mr. Huckabee's desire to "know more" doesn't extend to reading Mr. Obama's Wikipedia entry or his books, or listening to his speeches or interviews, he should spend that time instead looking at that incendiary document the Declaration of Independence.
It's an undisputed fact that the British Empire was "a bunch of imperialists," but they didn't exercise this talent in Indonesia.
Obviously, if the anti-British sentiments of one's parents are to be taken as indicators of treachery-to-come, there are a lot of Irish and Scottish Americans who ought be hauled in by the FBI and interviewed right now.
And if his Indonesian years had instilled a lifelong hatred of imperialism in the young Barack, it more likely would have been directed at the Dutch, the people who actually colonized Indonesia. In which case, Mr. Obama would have been more likely to leave the bust of Winston Churchill alone (the bust was lent by the British to George W. Bush after the events of Sept. 11, 2001) and run around the White House smashing any Delft china.
Mr. Huckabee's response to criticism of the interview was to say, through a spokesman (a man who might need work more hours), that he "misspoke." Of course Mr. Huckabee knows that the President was born in Hawaii and that Mr. Obama spent childhood time in Indonesia, not Kenya. He meant to say Indonesia. The Kenya thing was just a paragraph-long "slip of the tongue."
That would mean that Mr. Huckabee thinks the Mau Mau uprising took place in Indonesia. In which case, I think the Mau Maus were out of line, travelling all that way to stage a rebellion in someone else's country. Why, they were practically imperialists themselves – but that's where it gets confusing, because that would make them the good guys in Mr. Huckabee's mind.
As Mr. Huckabee pointed out later, he has accepted that Mr. Obama is an American. "That is not a popular position with conservatives, but it is the position I have consistently taken," he said in response to questions regarding the Malzberg interview.
I believe him. That's why it's almost painful to watch him speak something I've come to think of as "pidgin birther."
Pidgin birther is a cobbled-together language of vote commerce. It allows the speaker to communicate with birthers enough to secure votes without actually going native – which would be fatal in a presidential run.
Mr. Huckabee offered another example of the language when, later in the week, he said, "Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas …"
This translates, as all pidgin birther does, to: "Obama may be literally American, but he's not spiritually American."
There'll be a full phrase book out by 2012.