Even For Huckabee, Pretty Scummy

I'm watching the memorial service for Ted Kennedy right now, and remembering how conservatives launched a full-court press this week demanding that Democrats not politicize the event and use it to rally for health care reform. Exactly what would you call this bile from Mike Huckabee other than rank politicization?

The 2008 Republican presidential candidate suggested during his radio show, "The Huckabee Report," on Thursday that, under President Obama's health care plan, Kennedy would have been told to "go home to take pain pills and die" during his last year of life.

"[I]t was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don't have as long to live might want to consider just taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them," said Huckabee. "Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not. He freely did what most of us would do. He choose an expensive operation and painful follow up treatments. He saw his work as vitally important and so he fought for every minute he could stay on this earth doing it. He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for."

As it happens, Huckabee made his remarks shortly after he derided Democrats for using Kennedy's death to make the pitch that "Congress must hurry and pass the health care reform bill and do it in his memory,"

"That not only defies good taste," said Huckabee, "it defies logic."

Digby gets at most of what's wrong with this. Aside from the idea that "most of us" would choose an expensive operation when most of America does not have the means to use the upper tier of the health care system, it's simply disgusting to warn Democrats from making political hay out of the event of Kennedy's passing while doing exactly the same thing. Huckabee's lying about President Obama and the current bill, but even if he were talking straight, the duplicitousness is a bit much, even for him.

...I almost forgot that Huckabee was last seen claiming that evangelicals were more supportive of Israel than Jews, I guess because they want to prepare it for the Rapture more intensely.