While campaigning in favor of Issue 2 in Ohio (the referendum forced onto the ballot by voters in an attempt to veto the GOP bill that strips public unions of many collective bargaining rights), hilarious former Arkansas Governor and 2008 Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee encouraged supporters to suppress the votes of opponents…
“Make a list… Call them and ask them, 'Are you going to vote on Issue 2 and are you going to vote for it?' If they say no, well, you just make sure that they don't go vote. Let the air out of their tires on election day. Tell them the election has been moved to a different date. That's up to you how you creatively get the job done.”
Hilarious stuff. Particularly in Ohio. As Comedy Central's Dennis DiClaudio pointed out, “if any person who ever voted for a Democrat ever got within a 70-yard radius of a microphone and made a joke even slightly similar to that one, Andrew Breitbart would spend a long weekend foaming at the mouth in the video bay attempting to edit down footage of the guy into something that made him look like he murdered Ronald Reagan, and James O'Keefe would be trying to seduce him in front of a hidden camera with a salame.”
But, ya know, IOKIYAR.
But it's not the first time Huckabee —- now a host of a weekly show on Fox “News,” a cable channel that pretends to care about “voter fraud,” but only when they can trick viewers into believe it's being performed by Democrats —- has told the same bad “joke.” As we reported in April of 2009, he used the exact same voter-suppression hilarity while stumping for Virginia's then Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell…
Huckabee: You have two jobs. One – get all those people who are gonna vote for Bob out to the polls and vote. If they're not gonna vote for Bob, you have another job. Let the air out of their tires and do not let them out of their driveway on Election Day. Keep 'em home. Do the lord's work, my friend. I'm giving you an opportunity…yes, do the right thing.
Huck's “joke” worked last time. Despite McDonnell's Democratic opponent responding with a letter describing the matter as “no joking matter,” noting, “People died for the right to vote in this country, and we have to protect it,” McDonnell reportedly won the election. So why not encourage the same unlawfulness this time, eh?
Paul Weyrich —- the legendary rightwing demi-god, GOP godfather of modern day voter-suppression and founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the rightwing organization which literally drafted the templates used by GOP legislatures across the nation over the past year to pass all manner of voter-suppression bills set to affect some 5 million largely Democratic-leaning voters in 2012 —- would be proud. Perhaps Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, was amongst those at the Dallas convention of Baptist ministers in 1980 where Weyrich lectured from the podium —- next to good Christians like Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan —- on how keeping people from participating in their own democracy was a perfectly acceptable tactic to help Republicans win elections…
Weyrich: Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome – good government. They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.
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