Joking about Obama being assassinated while giving a speech to a room full of right-wing gun nuts? Nope. Nothing offensive about that! :rolleyes:
I’m trying to figure out how Dick Cheney didn’t make it into the joke. THAT joke would have been funny.
He used a brand new weasly phrase. No points from me.
Anything short of “I’m sorry,” or “I apologize for my comments,” or “I was wrong” is being a weasel.
He says his remark was not intended to disparage Obama. Then what WAS it intended to say about Obama? Of course it was intended to disparge Obama. If the image of a panicky, buffoonish Barack comically diving to the floor at the sight of a gun is not intended to be disparaging, then I don’tknow what is.
Regardless of his intent, it was uncomfortably evocative of an assassination joke and Huck should have known better (I have to admit, he doesn’t strike me as a racist. I’m inclined to think it was a “haw haw, liburuls is afeered a guns” type joke, that made it through the filter too quickly. Given five seconds to internally vet it, Huck probably would have seen the cow patty he was about to step in).
Because I am often morbidly, compulsively drawn to read some ultra-right message boards, I went to see what the Freepers were saying about it. To my surprise (and to their credit), they were almost universally condemning the joke as stupid and out of line. Hurtful to the GOP and to the NRA.
This might put the kibosh on the rumored McCain/Huckabee ticket, though.
That and the fact that they realize they’d be hypocrites if they laughed at it after years of condemning assassination jokes and innuendo from the far left about Bush.
Almost too bad. Would’ve made for an amusing race. 
I don’t know, I see it as saying “Obama thinks we NEED gun control because, you know, all us folk here at the NRA are always pointing guns at people backstage :rolleyes:”
Or to explain it better, I think he was making fun of gun control stance because with all those “gunheads” around someone MUST be getting aimed at, in fact even Obama is getting aimed at before speaking oh shit! (sarcastically).
Or maybe I’m giving Huckabee too many layers of nuance and finesse.
Don’t check there again. The Secret Service conducts those visits.
He touched a nerve because a lot of people—me included—are worried about Obama getting assassinated either before or after the election. There are a lot of people who would benefit from it and plenty of racist fucks willing to pull the trigger. And as left-wingers, we’ve been the subject of plenty of eliminationist rhetoric in the last eight years, from Ann Coulter saying that we need to learn that we can be killed to conservative t-shirts that read “Liberal Hunting License” to Rush Limbaugh calling for political violence during the Democratic Convention. And the people Obama threatens most have already lied to start a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, and who are potentially liable for war crimes.
So maybe he intended it to be a joke, but a lot of people heard “who will rid me of this troublesome priest?” Forgive us if our sense of humor is a little brittle right now.
Yes, it’s always the conservative ‘racist fucks’ who shoot politicians. Like Oswald (communist), Sirhan Sirhan (Palestinian), John Hinckley (urban nutbar) Arthur Bremer (who shot Gov Wallace), left winger who also wanted to kill Nixon.
Sarah Jane Moore, who attempted to assassinate Gerald Ford, was a left-wing radical. Squeaky Fromme, who also tried to murder Ford, was a member of the Manson Family.
Only James Earl Ray would qualify as a ‘racist fuck’ of any modern assassins or attempted assassins of American major politican figures. All the rest come from the left or were just plain nuts.
You’ve got a point about politically motivated assassinations. But racially motivated assassinations are pretty much exclusive to the extreme right-wing, and it’s Obama’s race, more than his politics, that make him a target.
Wait, how is that different from what he said?
Are you attempting to make a point?
Come on, Sam, you’re kind of avoiding the elephant here. Obama’s welfare is not feared for because he is a politician.
As posted by Annie:
“I apologize that my comments were offensive.”
No, Governor Huckabee, you were the one who was offensive. You.
To phrase it any other way, to insert that extra layer of indirection (“my comments were offensive”), is weaseling.
That’s an amazing feat of pedantry. You should take a bow.
Politicians are the modern masters of pedantry. They have staffs who carefully craft every scripted utterance to make their masters look as good as possible, to claim maximum credit when something goes right, and provide maximum distance when things go wrong. I have no problem with holding them to a high standard in what they say.
Barack Obama is catching some heat for calling a reporter “sweetie”. Part of his apology, as quoted in The Washington Post:
And this wasn’t a press conference. He called the reporter to apologize to her directly. The quote is from the message he left on her answering machine.
No weaseling.
What about the guy on the grassy knoll? He was conservative for all we know.
It would have been *way *funnier if it was made about Hillary…
Frostillicus nailed it in post 41
Not true. I know of two major black figures who have been murdered in the last forty years - Malcom X, and Martin Luther King. Malcom X was murdered by other members of the Nation of Islam, after Louis Farrakhan said that he ‘deserved death’ for fathering children of his teenage secretaries.
Almost every other racial assassination I can think of in recent times was against people of Jewish extraction, typically murdered by Muslim extremists.
Maybe there are some others I can’t remember. Can you list some racially motivated assassinations other than Dr. King’s, which were carried out by right wing racists?
I would note that even race baiters like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan have, so far as I know, never had an assassination attempt made on their lives. And Jackson has run for president a couple of times. On the other hand, People on the left tried to kill Reagan and Ford several times. Saddam tried to have George Bush I killed. Robert Kennedy was murdered by a Palestinian. John Kennedy by a Communist.
So why this belief that Barack Obama is under extreme danger from right wing racists? There’s really no evidence of this at all, is there? If right-wing racists had a history of taking shots at major African American politicians, you’d have a point. They don’t.
There are lunatics on all sides. I imagine every president has people plotting to kill him. The unlucky ones have it happen. But frankly, these days it’s probably far more dangerous to be George Bush or John McCain - because there’s a large organized group who would like to kill them - extremist muslims.
But something I just thought of… Obama may actually be in danger from them. Being born to a Muslim father and adopting Christianity makes him an apostate, doesn’t it? That makes him fair game for murder under the more extreme interpretations of Islam.
The Nation of Islam is a racist, conservative group.
No. This is a myth (And his father was no longer a Muslim by the time Barack was born).