Right now one of the top main page articles (from smintheus) and the top diary (from Steve Singiser) are about Mike Huckabee's off-the-cuff bad joke when talking to the NRA.
Slam Huckabee if you need to for "hate speech"; if that's what gets your adrenaline pumping, go to town. Personally I think the joke wasn't evil, just dumb.
Both the article and diary have as one of their foundations an entirely faulty premise though -- that the crowd laughed at the joke.
They didn't. The joke died a miserable, lonely death.
Evidence below the fold.
Here's the AP article about Huckabee's joke:
Hearing a loud noise and interrupting his speech, Huckabee said: "That was Barack Obama. He just tripped off a chair. He's getting ready to speak and somebody aimed a gun at him and he — he dove for the floor."
There were only a few murmurs in the crowd after the remark.
If you don't believe the AP, here's the video from CNN. The silence after Huckabee's joke is pretty deafening.
I'm just curious. Exactly how many times does Obama have to talk about bringing the country together before it starts to sink in? I appreciate that old habits die hard, but attacking members of the NRA for something they didn't do should have no place on this site, or anywhere.
The NRA are not the enemy. If you treat them as such, you are playing into the hands of those who have kept the country divided for cynical political purposes.
EDIT: I headed out the door soon after I posted this, and had no idea it'd been rec'd until now. I'll try to respond to as many comments as I can, but if I don't get to you just wanted everyone to know that this wasn't a hit 'n' run job...