Huckabee’s attack on Beyonce is silly
By Fred McKissack
Tribune News Service
It seems like Mike Huckabee is running out of ideas.
That is why the ex- Arkansas governor and presidential aspirant is aiming at an icon of pop culture. Beyonce, he says and writes, sprays the airwaves with trashy lyrics and videos that will lead young women to the stripper pole. He even manages to use the word “pimp” in describing her husband’s Jay-Z’s role, not realizing that Beyonce’s career was soaring long before he put a ring on her finger.
Huckabee has thrown the values chip in the game, but small blind is probably going to get swamped by Mitt Romney. He is trying to appeal to folks who nod their heads in agreement while trying to convince themselves that the songs of their youth were just homegrown slices of pure Americana goodness.
But Huckabee shared a stage with Ted Nugent, whose controversial lyrics and behavior are notorious. I saw Nugent live in St. Louis in 1980. I was 14, and I went with another 14-year-old. We weren’t the only teens there, thus negating the absurd assertion by Huckabee on “The Daily Show” that Nugent’s music is aimed at adults.
Every generation has its moment when an older politician plays the cultural Moses, preaching fire and brimstone. Invariably, he or she ends up looking foolish. Consider that in 1964, Indiana Gov. Matthew Welsh asked the state’s broadcasters to ban the song “Louie, Louie” because he thought it was pornographic.
The real insult here is that Huckabee managed to include the first family in his nonsensical argument. In his new book “God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy,” he calls out the president: “Jay-Z and Beyonce have been to the White House numerous times, but how can it be that the Obamas let Sasha and Malia listen to that trash?”
Moammar Gadhafi
Huckabee would have made more sense if he had pointed out that Beyonce performed for the then-Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi and his entourage at a private party on the Caribbean island of St. Barts in 2009. After much-deserved criticism, she donated the proceeds of the gig to charity.
Huckabee’s purpose, though, is to distract the public.
As the conservative National Review reported online on Jan. 26, his tenure as governor included “long, long record of ethical scrapes (some of which bordered on the kind of activities for which former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell was just convicted).”
If you can’t run on your own record, you run on a platform of misdirection.
Fred McKissack is a writer and editor who lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He wrote this for Progressive Media Project, a source of liberal commentary.