Yesterday, Mike Huckabee ended his daily radio program, fueling speculation that he did so in order to prepare to make another run for the White House in 2016. And judging by the spate of "Huckabee open to making another run" articles published today, there really can't be much doubt that that it exactly what he is intending to do.
As such, we thought it might be wise to take a moment to just remind everyone that Huckabee is, at his core, a Religious Right activist, which he openly admits.
Huckabee is more than comfortable associating with fringe figures like Rod Parsley and End Times fanatic Tim LaHaye, which make sense considering that he literally got his start back in the 1970s working for "God's Hit Man" James Robison and nothing has changed since then.
But nothing better exemplifies Huckabee's close ties to the most radical figures in the Religious Right movement than his appearance at the Values Voter Debate organized by Janet Porter back in 2007 when Huckabee made his first run for president.
At the debate, which all of the mainstream candidates wisely skipped, Huckabee, Alan Keyes, Sam Brownback and various other second-tier candidates stood on stage, fielding questions from the likes of Phyllis Schlafly, Don Wildmon, Judge Roy Moore, Mat Staver, Rick Scarborough, and others on the issues they cared about.
The event began, if you can believe it, with a choir singing a reworked version of "God Bless America" that asked instead "Why Should God Bless America?" and railed against abortion and lack of prayer in schools:
Things only got weirder from there, when organizers spent five minutes asking questions to empty podiums in an effort to highlight the fact that the front-running candidates snubbed the debate.
When it was all said and done, Huckabee was the run-away winner of the event and shortly thereafter his campaign announced the creation of a Faith and Family Values Coalition, which consisted of a who's who of radical Religious Right activists.
And it was not difficult to understand why the fringiest of right-wing activists were so eager to endorse Huckabee's candidacy because, as he explained to them at the Values Voter Debate, he was one of them:
"As a candidate for president," Huckabee assured them, "I'm not just a person who comes and speaks the language of Zion as a second language; for me, it's a native tongue. There are a lot of people running for president and every one of them are going to come to you and tell you that they're with you, but are they? Many of them will come to you; I come from you."
