Saturday, May 24, 2008

Huckabee defended

He forgot that you must never joke about any black. They are far too sensitive for that.

We read:
"John Hopwood's May 18, 2008, Associated Content article, "Mike Huckabee Blows His Chances at Vice Presidency with Shameless Remark at N.R.A. Convention" which accused Mike Huckabee of both making a racist remark and being racist, raised the ire of many of the article's readers in the form of stern rebuffs in the article's reader comments. If any conclusions can be drawn from scoring the large number of reader comments the article has received, most readers disagreed with Hopwood that the likeable Huckabee's comments were racist.

Most of the reader comments defended Huckabee and were critical of Hopwood's conclusion that Huckabee had made a racist comment concerning Democratic presidential hopeful, Barack Obama. While addressing the National Rifle Association, according to Hopwood, "hearing a sound from backstage while giving his speech to the N.R.A. faithful, Huckabee, who has been noted for his wit by a generally fawning press, quipped, 'That was Barack Obama. He just tripped off a chair. He's getting ready to speak.' The audience began laughing at Huckabee's remark, and continued when he made the extraordinarily insensitive remark, 'Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor.' " The incident was reported in a brief story in the L.A. Times on May 17.

Sunday, Huckabee appeared on NBC's Meet the Press telling the moderator, Tim Russett, that, "it was a dumb, off-the-cuff remark." Huckabee also issued a statement on his website www.huckpac.com, saying, "I made an off-hand remark that was in no way intended to offend or disparage Sen. Obama. I apologize that my comments were offensive; that was never my intention."

Source

If he had said that about John McCain, the media would have said what a great guy Huck is. It's the media who are racist.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If people are that damn sensitive, maybe they should go find an old bomb shelter and lock themselves away from the world. I don't see how either of those comments can be considered racial. Hell, by that logic, saying Obama crossed the street can be consiered a racial comment.
Everyone is free, that includes the freedom whether or not to be offended, words offend because people choose to be offended by them.

Anonymous said...

His comment was dumb, but as I understand it, it had nothing to do with race. What made it appalling was the part about pointing a gun at him, a clear violation of the rules of safety, not to mention joking about murderous intent.

It would have worked if he had said, "That was Barak Obama. He knocked his chair over as he bolted to get out of the building. He just found out that someone here actually owns a gun!" I bet that would have gotten a big laugh.

Same basic joke with a non-offensive (except to gun grabbers) execution. That's the problem with off the cuff comments of any kind. It's easy to phrase a decent idea the wrong way.

Anonymous said...

I'm with Ed.
Whether or not you think the comment was amusing - it had nothing to do with race.
It did, however, raise the same spectre as Hillary has just done - assassination. Of course, the Kennedy clan will tell you that isn't necessarily racial either.