That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he's getting ready to speak. Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor.
The liberal blogs are understandably outraged. To joke about anyone aiming a gun at a presidential candidate is not only bad taste, it's the kind of thing that would get you arrested at a campaign rally if you were just an ordinary citizen.
At this moment there are men surrounding Obama who have sworn to give their lives to protect him. We pay their salaries because we think it is that important to our democracy to keep our candidates from being eliminated before the ballots are even cast.
How sad that in this once enlightened country we have to do that. How sad that we do not feel so privileged, so grateful to have inherted this democracy from our ancestors that violence against a candidate, or even joking about violence against a candidate, would never happen here.
I don't know what was in the mind of Mike Huckabee. Not much, it seems, because he sure didn't give that comment much thought. Whether or not it reveals something more fundamentally flawed about this man I can't say.
But if you add this joke to the words of one person in West Virginia who, according to the Washington Post, said of Obama "hang that darky from a tree," you realize we still have serious racial problems in this country.
There are so many things to condemn about what Huckabee said. I suppose if he was out hunting with Dick Cheney and heard a loud noise and said that was Cheney shooting and everybody ducked you might be able to consider it funny, though I don't think many of us would.
But to joke about the presumptive Democratic nominee, when many of us still remember the Kennedys, the Democratic president and Democratic presidential candidate, who were assassinated in our lifetimes, is reprehensible. And when the nominee also happens to be black, when so many black leaders were assassinated in their fight for civil rights, the "joke" is beyond tasteless. It is dangerous.
I don't think Mike Huckabee is a bad person. I think he is a smart, funny, and well meaning individual. And I would imagine he deeply regrets his comments and will apologize for them. But the fact that someone this accomplished, who was recently prominent on the national stage, could be so clueless, so insensitive, and so capable of allowing something like this to come out of his mouth, tells me we still have a very long way to go in this country to overcome our inclinations to violence as well as racism.
Some things simply aren't funny. Aiming a gun at someone, and a political candidate being in fear of assassination are two of those things.
