Mike Huckabee Is Lying

First, Mike Huckabee says Barack Obama grew up in Kenya and may have been influenced by the Mau Mau revolution there. Then he backtracks and says he meant Indonesia, which doesn't make a lot of sense because the Mau Mau revolution was, in fact, in Kenya. Not buying it, writes Joe Klein. Huckabee "always struck me as a good guy, more concerned about working-class America than most of his rivals," he writes in Time. "These comments, however, and his subsequent lie that he really meant Indonesia not Kenya, really show a demented, perverse sensibility, and they demonstrate some of the ugliness at the heart of Obama hatred."

Huckabee is purposely linking Obama to the bloody Mau Mau rebellion (which Klein says was shorthand for "Extremely Scary Black People" in the 1960s) and thus feeding "all the worst, paranoid fears of Glenn Beck's America," he writes. At Salon, Steve Kornacki is also skeptical it was an innocent mistake but says it looks like Huckabee "will walk away from this relatively unscathed." Ben Smith, however, writes in his Politico blog that Huckabee has never dabbled in birther territory and just "pretty clearly misspoke." Click for more. (More Mike Huckabee stories.)