Tim Murphy of Mother Jones reports:
Obama’s a mole, gays caused Noah’s flood, and other hits from one of two Janets that Huck says he “answers to” (the other’s his wife).
Mike Huckabee’s close ties to far-right activists helped propel him to a second-place finish in the race for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008. But as the former Arkansas governor mulls another White House run, the incendiary remarks and outright paranoia of one of his close advisers serve as a reminder that Huckabee’s greatest asset—his relationship with the religious right—may also be one of his greatest vulnerabilities.
Huckabee has joked that he “answers” to “two Janets.” One is his wife, Janet Huckabee. The other is Janet Porter, the onetime co-chair of Huckabee’s Faith and Values Coalition. And Porter, the former governor has said, is his “prophetic voice.” But that voice has said some weird things over the years: Porter has maintained that Obama represents an “inhumane, sick, and sinister evil,” and she has warned that Democrats want to throw Christians in jail merely for practicing their faith. She’s attributed Haiti’s high poverty rate to the fact that the country is “dedicated to Satan,” and she suggested that gay marriage caused Noah’s Flood. And there’s this: In a 2009 column for conservative news site WorldNetDaily, Porter asserted that President Barack Obama is a Soviet secret agent, groomed since birth to destroy the United States from within.
(click here to continue reading Huckabee Adviser: Obama is a Soviet Spy | Mother Jones.)
Mike Huckabee is the scariest GOP candidate. He hides his evangelical extremism behind an aw-shucks facade so successfully that even normally astute people like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are fooled by it. There is nothing friendly about Huckabee’s beliefs, nor in his advisors like Janet Porter. Scary, scary people who wouldn’t think twice about sending liberal, secular humanists like myself to re-education camps.
“Brace yourself for what I am about to say next,” Porter began one column, published shortly after the inauguration. She then detailed an email that had been forwarded to her raising questions about the president’s status as an American citizen. But that was the least of it: If the email were correct, the president was a Soviet agent—and so were his parents. He had been conceived, in other words, with the sole purpose of destroying the nation from within.
As Porter explained, the letter had originally been composed by a software developer named Tom Fife. “All I know is that Tom Fife is a real guy—not some e-mail scam,” she wrote. “I’ve talked to him.” In the email, Fife recounted a dinner-party conversation he’d had with a Soviet scientist in Moscow in the early 1990s.
“Since I had dabbled in languages,” Fife wrote, “I knew a smattering of Arabic. I made a comment: ‘If I remember correctly, ‘Barack’ comes from the Arabic word for ‘Blessing.’ That seems to be an odd name for an American.’ [The Soviet scientist] replied quickly, ‘Yes. It is ‘African,’ she insisted, ‘and he will be a blessing for world Communism. We will regain our strength and become the number one power in the world.'”
From there, Porter’s rhetoric only escalated. Last summer, she lost her syndicated radio show after organizing a rally at the Lincoln Memorial to urge Christians to take over the United States government. And this spring, she made headlines by summoning a fetus to testify on behalf of an Ohio measure banning abortions after a heartbeat has become detectable. (Huckabee has endorsed the bill).