"As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say 'That's a terrible statement!' ... I grew up in a very segregated South. And I think that you have to cut some slack -- and I'm gonna be probably the only conservative in America who's gonna say something like this, but I'm just tellin' you -- we've gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names..."
Rod Dreher links to a guy with a history of calling names:
I think my mother had decency enough to be embarrassed as the man took her money and handed over the prescription as he muttered, "I'm not a n***er." I wonder what that poor man must have felt -- what a man old enough to be my father felt -- when this little white boy was blithely, naturally as he breathed in the air, running around the house announcing the presence of the fill-in-the-blank "n***er."
What does it do to a man to be so cavalierly dehumanized even by a small child? What does it do to a small child to so cavalierly dehumanize a man he ought to be calling "sir"? At least in a more rightly ordered society.
I am an enormous fan of Huckabee's, if only because of his ability to confound the left. After Iowa, he was a crazy right-wing Christian extremist. But then he criticized Bush's foreign policy. And now this? Complexity Overload!
Statements like this make one wonder what kind of long-term game Huckabee is playing. A McCain-Huckabee ticket would be an amazing one to watch.
