Shocker: Huckabee on wrong side of culture war — again

Earlier this week, former Gov. Mike Huckabee stumbled back out from the mists of presidential also-rans to inflict another tone-deaf treatise on the body politic, returning once again to one of his favorite targets, Jay Z. 

After Hillary Clinton’s campaign announced a Nov. 4 concert featuring the Grammy winning artist in support of early voting for the candidate, Huckabee attacked the candidate and Jay Z himself in a Facebook posting, saying: “So Hillary Clinton is horrified by sexist and obscene language … unless it comes from famous rappers who set it to a beat and use it to promote her presidential campaign.”

Huckabee went on to claim Clinton’s ethics were “situational,” pushing a narrative of a double-standard on former Secretary of State Clinton’s part when it comes to her supporters.

{mosads}For whatever reason, a lot of men on the right side of the spectrum, including Huckabee, continue to have real trouble understanding that the revulsion and outrage over Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood interview didn’t come about because he used the word “p—y.” It came about because of what he bragged about doing to those delightful organs without their owners’ permission. Once more for the people in the back; it isn’t about foul language, it’s about sexual assault. Got that now? Good. Moving on.

Nor was this the first time Huckabee has revealed his odd fixation on Jay Z, who is widely regarded as one of the best rappers of all time. In the run up to yet another failed presidential campaign last year, Huckabee took aim at both Jay Z and Beyoncé, a black “power couple” unrivalled in cultural impact and influence by any except the Obamas. 

In his book “God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy,” Huckabee made the racially-charged accusation that Jay Z was acting like a “pimp,”exploiting his wife’s sexuality for… something or other. Nevermind the fact that Beyoncé manages her own career, is worth just shy of half a billion dollars in her own right, and embraced her own sexual magnetism and identity long before she married Shawn Carter.

Huckabee’s tisk-tisking of Beyoncé’s stage persona, and the assumption that a multi-award winning, multi-platinum album performing artist worth hundreds of millions of dollars must be beholden to the demands of her husband is breathtakingly sexist. But Huckabee’s worldview utterly prevents him from recognizing the underlying assumptions that led to the stupidity. To an outdated fossil like Huckabee, wives are automatically subservient to their husbands. He simply takes this as an immutable truth of the universe, like the tides or the phases of the moon.

It’s not just that Huckabee is wrong, it’s that the software that runs his operating system is so antiquated that expecting him to be able to recognize where he’s gone wrong is like trying to install Photoshop onto an old vacuum-tube, punch-card reading IBM. He simply doesn’t possess the capacity to adapt to the new reality. Nor is he alone.

Huckabee’s comments weren’t meant for Jay Z and Beyoncé’s throngs of millions of fans of all ethnicities, they were meant for the ever-dwindling numbers of older, rural, white evangelicals who make up his base of support. People for whom anything that has even a whiff of “urban” (read: people of color) influence is responsible for the complete unraveling of good olde, genuine American Values. They are the social scolds who in generations past boycotted The Beatles, and were sure that Elvis Presley’s swiveling hips were going to single handedly impregnate every teenage girl in the country.

And people wonder why the GOP has lost millennials? It’s not a mystery.

But, Gov Huckabee needs these people to remain relevant. He needs to keep them spun up and shaking their fingers so that he continues to get invited back onto Fox News, so he can continue getting advances for his next literary bowel movement, and so he can trick a dwindling pool of donors into funding his next doomed presidential bid in 2020, alongside other political parasites like Perry and Santorum.

He can’t stop the con now. It’s his only source of income.

Tomlinson is an author and comedian. Follow him @stealthygeek.

The views expressed by Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.