An interesting article forwarded to me by my best friend (and fellow Obama Supporter). Not that any of this will shock us Dems - in fact most of it has come out to those of us who don't "believe".. but i'm sure if he becomes front runner after South Carolina, some of this info should help derail his ride. Or perhaps not.. we are talking about people who think Bush is still "perfect".
Anyway.. read on:
Nov. 13, 2007 | LITTLE ROCK, Ark. -- The Pony Express has reached us here in the Arkansas backwoods with the latest journals from the big cities. So the country correspondents have taken a break from hand-setting lines of type to read the Beltway boys and girls rave about our former governor, Mike Huckabee.
"Easy to like," wrote Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. "Who Doesn't Heart Huckabee?" said the headline over Gail Collins' column in the New York Times. And those are restrained commentators. If you Google the names Ronald Reagan and Mike Huckabee in tandem, I understand you get better than 600,000 hits.
OK. I exaggerate. I have a phone and a computer (and it's 208,000 hits). But you'd think from national press comments that our friendly state is unreachable by phone or Internet. Do national commentators do homework? Or is a smiling, shoe-shining parson all it takes to generate such fluff?
Come to Arkansas. You'll have to look hard to find a long-term political analyst who'd subscribe fully to the national media narrative about the latest man from Hope -- fresh face, funny, nice.
Mike Huckabee is fresh to you, maybe. Funny? If barnyard humor is your shtick of choice. Nice? Well, he did do some good things in his 10 years as governor, but ... read on.
Before we begin, though, a word of warning to any reporters who might want to repeat, on air or in print, any of the facts recounted below. Huckabee does not take kindly to journalists who practice journalism.
Even editorialists and columnists at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the state's dominant (and Republican-friendly) daily paper, use words like "petty" and "thin-skinned" to describe Huckabee. Then again, he's compared hard-hitting (and accurate) news reporters for the Democrat-Gazette to the press fabulists Jayson Blair and Janet Cooke. He called liberal columnist John Brummett of Stephens Media "constipated" when that early admirer commenced some gentle criticism. His administration paid $15,000 to settle a suit filed by Roby Brock, the host of a public TV news show whom Huckabee's people tried to force off the air for his critical commentary.
Then there's me. I'm the editor of an alternative weekly, but I began covering Huckabee when I was a columnist for the now-defunct daily Arkansas Gazette in 1991, and Mike and I have been on the outs pretty much ever since. He once called me and the Memphis Commercial Appeal bureau chief "junkyard journalists" for our reporting. He also compared me, in print, to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and, I've been told on good authority, has wished aloud for my early and violent demise.
Click here for the rest of the article:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/11/13/huckabee/
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