And the Grift Goes On

What's that line about the last refuge of a scoundrel?

Arkansas ex-governor and holy man Mike Huckabee has been worrying during the pandemic about the needs of stuck-at-home parents and their restless, educationally challenged children, and his special little thing, writes Jesselyn Cook at Huffpost, has been offering them a special deal on merch from his Learn Our History company, advertising it for hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook:

Wonder why "FREE" is in scare quotes in the ad? Well, partly because there's a $1 charge for each item in the bundle (such as "The Kids Guide to Coronavirus", "The Kids Guide to President Trump" and "Great Again" video, the "Civil Rights Bundle For Kids", and other units with more "positive, patriotic and unbiased" messages than those "found in many textbooks in use today."

But wait, there's more!

If you don't click there in the (non-scrollable) box and check out the complete Terms & Conditions, you won't find out that you've also committed yourself to 

a subscription to Learn Our History’s “Kids Guides” that come “around once a month for the low price of $15.95 plus $4.95 [shipping and processing] per set, billed conveniently to your credit or debit card on file,” as well as an additional subscription to EverBright Kids magazine for an extra $5.75.

You'll just keep getting the stuff and getting charged, and if you think it's going to be easy to cancel once you figure out what they've done to you, you would be wrong. Cook comments,

This isn’t the first time that Huckabee has cashed in on apparent scams. The former Fox News host has spent much of his post-gubernatorial life shilling for grifters, including the sellers of a $74 biblical cancer cure and a diabetes “reversal” treatment containing a “secret ingredient”: cinnamon. (“Let me tell you that diabetes can be reversed. I should know because I did it — and today you can, too!” he said in a 2015 infomercial before railing against prescription drugs, Big Pharma and the “mainstream medical community.”)

Why don't these people ever go to jail?

Well Said, Mr. POTUS

John William Waterhouse (1845-1917), The remorse of Nero after the murder of his mother, pen and ink, via Artnet.

Do I detect—this is going to sound weird—a note of remorse in our poet-president's response to the newspaper office slaughter in Annapolis on Thursday? Because what does he mean, otherwise, with "shocked the conscience of our nation"? What "shocks the conscience" other than the awareness of guilt?

I'd Like to Address

By Donald J. Trump

I’d like to address the horrific shooting
that took place yesterday at Capital Gazette
newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland.
This attack shocked the conscience of our nation
and filled our hearts with grief. Journalists,
like all Americans, should be free from the fear
of being violently attacked while doing their job.

Horrible, horrible event, horrible thing happened.
In your suffering, we pledge our eternal support.
The suffering is so great... My government will not
rest until we have done everything in our power
to reduce violent crime and to protect innocent life.

I always feel the formula "I'd like to address" is apologetic in its own right, in the sense of if you'd like to, why don't you just do it? But yes, I'm thinking about the intemperate violence of the president's language toward journalists, the way he keeps them caged at his rallies and mocks them for the delectation of the fans, and the failure of society at large to recognize the signs, especially in the murderer's Twitter feed, as reported in the Baltimore Sun:

Annals of derp: Jonah Goldberg on American political theory

Welcome Crooks, Liars, and the people who love them! Thanks, Tengrain.

And on air guitar... Image via Crooks&Liars.

Mike Huckabee doesn’t have a lot of prominent defenders, and I am not volunteering for the job.

Imma let you finish, Jonah....

Huckabee has always struck me as a right-wing populist-progressive. A deeply religious — and by all accounts decent — man...

Not quite all accounts. There's a little disagreement on that score. I mean, just on a couple of issues. Not necessarily anything serious. Or anything.

...Huckabee nonetheless has a view of the state that would have jibed almost perfectly with such forgotten titans of the Progressive Era as Richard Ely, Josephus Daniels, and even William Jennings Bryan.

Ah, here we go. Progressives are the real Prohibitionists, or is it the other way around?

Cheap shots: Huckabee

Huckabee:

"This is not just a political issue. It is a biblical issue. And as a biblical issue, unless I get a new version of the scriptures, it’s really not my place to say, ‘Okay, I’m just going to evolve.’ It’s like asking somebody who’s Jewish to start serving bacon-wrapped-shrimp in their deli," he said. "We’re so sensitive to make sure we don’t offend certain religions, but then we act like Christians can’t have the convictions that they’ve had for over 2,000 years."

I know, I know, fuck Huckabee. I guess one would have to in order to make his analogy there work, assuming the deli owner was a strictly observant Jew; the only way to put Huckabee in a similar position with regard to gay marriage would to marry him off to some masterful dude and pop his tiny rectum, which I don't believe any supporters of marriage equality really want to do.

Cheap shots: Pimp my (plane) ride

“Beyoncé is incredibly talented — gifted, in fact,” Huckabee wrote. “She has an exceptional set of pipes and can actually sing. She is a terrific dancer –— without the explicit moves best left for the privacy of her bedroom. Jay Z is a very shrewd businessman, but I wonder: Does it occur to him that he is arguably crossing the line from husband to pimp by exploiting his wife as a sex object?” (Via RollingOut)

Blurb:

In God, Guns, Grits and Gravy, Mike Huckabee asks, “Have I been taken to a different planet than the one on which I grew up?”

Hmm, I'd say it's not impossible. What quadrant are you from?

How a bill becomes bull

Brother Huckabee explains it all (thanks, Tengrain):

we've got three branches of government
and each are equal to the other
the founders took extraordinary measures
to prevent too much power being grabbed by one person or group...

The Temptations of Saint Huckabee

Defenestration, installation by Brian Goggin, San Francisco 1997. Image via infoteli.

And speaking of floridly bad writing, here's Sir Charles C.W. (Constant Worry) Cooke, Bart., in the National Review:

No sooner had the word “libido” left Huckabee’s lips than all context, judgment, and verisimilitude were hastily defenestrated; Huckabee, who has not held public office since 2007, had been turned into the de facto spokesman for the entire Republican party; and the word had gone out across the Kingdom that there was a new monster at the gates....