I felt compelled to write Mike Huckabee regarding his comments on health care and Ted Kennedy. The inspiration for the letter and the transcript of Huckabee's words comes via The Huffington Post...
Conservative media figures are blasting Democrats for trying to draw political gain from the death of Senator Ted Kennedy. But on Thursday, it was one of their own -- former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee -- who went there. 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…. …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," to which Huckabee replied, "That not only defies good taste, it defies logic."
-MY LETTER-
Dear Mike Huckabee,
Your latest comments regarding the president’s health-care plan and Senator Kennedy not only defy good taste, they defy logic. But then, you know this, don’t you?
When you got up on your pulpit, so to speak, and criticized congress for the as of yet politicization of Kennedy’s death and then turn right around and politicize his death before he’d even been placed in the ground, you proved yourself to be a fool first and a contemptible hypocrite second.
You used to be a preacher, right? I can only imagine what minds you must have turned out from your sermons, what lowly forms you must have shaped in the house of God. There must be tens of thousands of misshapen and unfilled men and women walking around with a duplicitous air about them.
Shame on you, shame on you for having done what you knew to be wrong. Shame on you for imagining, no, for knowing, that what you said went completely against what Teddy had fought for his entire life! You, sir, must be a sad man to go the way of a weak-minded marauder, to flout the teachings of your own personal Jesus by resorting to falsehoods in order to gain some imagined political foothold when, in all honesty, there isn’t one for you. You remind me of a snake oil salesman giving a longwinded spiel about the healing properties of his prepackaged mumbo-jumbo juice. He too uses inflammatory language to sway a sale upon the unwitting fools who believe anything they hear spoken with a shade of bravado.
Is that what you want to be known as, a snake oil salesman from Arkansas? Do you want to be remembered as a political preacher sowing fear into the hearts and minds of the citizenry? Wouldn’t you rather be known as a man who used his talents and aspirations to better an already quaking world? My guess is the latter. So why not do just that? Begin to stand against the lies and the fear mongering that are infiltrating our national dialogue, fear for no better reason than some political bone to pick.
You can do it, Mr. Huckabee. I have faith in you, sir. You can be a better man for yourself and for this nation. We don’t need more snake oil salesmen or women, we need men and women to deliver strong leadership that can rise above the status quo and truly make effective changes that benefit all of society. Not left or right or center or rich or poor or black or brown or white, but all of this nations citizenry. We deserve better from our leaders, whether they are serving or whether they have served and still have a sizeable audience that they can sway for the betterment of mankind, we deserve better.
If you don’t speak truth instead of lies to power and begin to truly make a difference then you’re no better than all the other snake oil salesmen and women who lie through their teeth to gain something for themselves. What would a good man do? Seriously, what would a good man do? You know. You know what he would do. So do it…
Sincerely and with peace,
Mark R. Prime
(thepoetryman)
