It takes a bold, fearless, once morbidly obese leader to come out with two wildly offensive and regressive (like, serious dark ages kind of shit) positions in just one blessed day. Mike Huckabee is that man. For those keeping track at home, Huckabee, who may win tonight's South Carolina primary ... 1. Is totally down with the Confederate flag staying up. A new television ad running in South Carolina by the "Americans for the Preservation of American Culture" praised the Arkansas Governor for understanding "that we value our heritage, and why." Rather than backing away from the issue, Huckabee stood up for his "states rights" (race rights? state whites?) position:

"You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag," Huckabee told supporters in Myrtle Beach, S.C. "In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell 'em what to do with the pole, that's what we'd do."

Super! And speaking of telling them what to do with that pole ... 2. ...Huckabee directly, and without hesitation, compared homosexuality to bestiality. Are we doing this again? Really? Huckabee:

I think the radical view is to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal.

For fuck's sake. While I admire Huckabee's obvious creativity (a man and three women ... me-yow), he's actually taken a position more extreme than Rick Santorum in 2003. As Talking Points Memo noted, Santorum made a "slippery slope" case ... wherein gays marrying gays would lead to gays marrying goats. Huckabee eliminates the "pandoras box" argument and goes right for the man-on-mammal parallel: Two men marrying is the same as me marrying Trouble, my parent's extremely highstrung (and quite fetching) bijon frise. (Sidenote: Is there something we should know about this dog?) 3. Lastly, and back to white supremacy for a moment, a good piece up today by the estimable Max Blumenthal details the extent of Huckaboom's connection to some out and proud white supremacists in Arkansas throughout the 90s. Grand Wizard Huckabee gave an "extremely well-received address" to the "Council of Conservative Citizens," whose mission statement includes this little gem:

"We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called "affirmative action" and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races."

Nice stuff! He's really showing that "populist" streak. Somehow, in spite of all this, Grand Wizard Huckabee continues to be lauded by the media for his "nice guy" persona and for being in touch with the people when its clear that he is pretty much a Nazi.