Gaffe?

Governor Mike Huckabee did not just slip up on conservative talk radio, I think he messed up, big-time. Had he simply said, mistakenly, that Barack Obama grew up in Kenya, when he really meant Indonesia, it might just have been an actual slip of the tongue. But he created--or repeated--a story around Obama's supposed Kenyan childhood, a mythology that suggests Obama isn't "one of us."

It just seems to me that the real horror isn't even his own really foolish error--after all, Obama wasn't even in Kenya during his childhood, he had no Mau Mau leanings, nor did he learn to be anti-Brit or hate Winston Churchill. The real problem is that Gov. Huckabee, a legitimate candidate for the Presidency of the United States, a man some polls have leading the cast of Republican candidates, allowed a talk show host to ask a question the good Reverend should slapped back across the table.

Good, red-blooded Americans have every right to disagree with Obamacare or liberal politics or anti-colonialism. The American way is to join the party, print up some signs, hit the streets and get out the vote.

But it is plainly wrong not to stop the hate speech, the hateful insinuation that President Obama shouldn't be who he is or where he is because of what he isn't--"one of us." Sen. John McCain did just that in one of the finest moments of the '08 campaign. Gov. Huckabee would have grown in stature had he told that interviewer as much, as clearly.

I don't care what anybody else calls it, that kind of talk feels for all the world like racism, plain and simple.

Rev. Huckabee is a man of the cloth, a man of God. He should know better. He should also do better.