Poison Pen Prize

Gail Collins riffs on the bad writing of politicians. My bad writing did not make it past the Times moderators,* so here it is:

If you're going to go as far as Europe looking for politicians who plagiarize, include Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Germany's defense minister who is/was the country's most popular politician. He resigned earlier this week amid allegations that he plagiarized parts of his doctoral dissertation. One imagines that his resignation is a subtle admission of guilt. That's Guttenberg, not Gutenberg, which without that extra "t" would have been funnier.

Can't tell if this is Huck or Pinocchio, but as they say in Arkansas, "same difference."But I would leave the worst literary crime to our own Mike Huckabee. I refer to a section in one of his many heartwarming books that you must have somehow skipped over last week in your exhaustive study of the vast body of Works of Huckabee. (At least one of the literary works explains why Huck no longer has an actual vast body.)

Our Huck tried a Tom Sawyerish sidestep to get out of what very charitably can be called the Whopper of the Week in which he said that "one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya." "His" being "Barack Obama's." At least he properly used the possessive. Still, since we all know that Obama was reared in Hawaii & Indonesia, Huck implies that he doesn't know anything. I think you said as much yourself last week.

In his radio interview with some right-wing host, Huck went on to elaborate on Obama's jaded view of the Mau Mau Revolution against British rule, a bloody affair which no Brit today would attempt to defend. (In fact, neither did Winston Churchill -- he opposed the British abuse of the Mau Maus. More on Sir Winnie below.)

It turns out this imaginary Mau Mau-Obama connection is something Huck has given a lot of thought. In fact, he wrote about it. In a book titled Simple Government (probably should have had a subtitle For the Simple-Minded and Credulous), Huck expressed his displeasure at Obama's having removed a bust of Churchill from the Oval Office. Here's part of the offending passage:

The British newspaper the Daily Telegraph explained Obama's strange behavior: 'Churchill has less happy connotations for Mr. Obama than for those American politicians who celebrate his wartime leadership. It was during Churchill's second premiership that Britain suppressed Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion. Kenyans allegedly tortured by the colonial regime included one Hussein Onyango Obama, the President's grandfather.'

Every president is the keeper of our American narrative, 'our story.' He is the commander in chief, yes, but he is also commemorator in chief....

President Obama's emphasis on his story rather than history has become symptomatic of his tenure. He is going to impose his agenda on Americans, and he doesn't care if we don't share it, don't believe in it, or don't want it.

First, Huck did not mention in his well-researched masterpiece that Obama replaced the Churchill bust with one of Abraham Lincoln, one of Obama's heroes.

Second, according to British historian David Anderson, whom Justin Elliott of Salon interviewed, Obama's grandfather could not have been tortured by the Brits in the Mau Mau Revolution, because he lived in another part of Kenya where there was no rebellion. The scholarly Anderson said of Huckabee's assertion, that it was "stir-fry crazy."

Third, the whole point of Huck's cloying, totally inaccurate passage is the standard right-wing meme: "Obama is not one of 'us.'"

So I'm giving Mike Huckabee, potential presidential candidate, my Poison Pen Prize for the week. Or month.

* Update: my comment showed up this morning on the second page of comments, but this version has a few fewer typos. And it comes with links!