The Changing Mike Huckabee

So what's up with Mr. Mike these days. It seems like he has made a decision to travel down the low road to a possible run for President. How irritating was it to hear him make a claim that Obama was not one of us because "he grew up in Kenya"? Obama first visited Kenya at the age of 26. It is well known where he grew up. It's just more lies from the Republican machine that includes Fox News and just about all of it's TV personalities.

Lawrence O'Donnell had a great story on a recent broadcast that accused Huckabee and Bill O'Reilly with lying to the American people about Barack Obama. O'Donnell then gives an outstanding accounting of how great the American story of Barack Obama actually is. Huckabee goes on O'Reilly's show to tell America that Barack Obama is not one of us because he was not a Boy Scout or little league player when he was growing up.

The Boy Scout reference brought me right back to my childhood. Now let me think; I believe it was the first Monday of every month our troop leaders would pile us into cars and we would travel to the YMCA (you know what that is) to go swimming. Yes it is very important for kids to know how to swim, but to this day I have no idea why we all had to be completely naked. That's right, I said 30 or 40 boys aged 12 to 16 swimming naked at the YMCA while the dirty old chaperons sat along side the pool and leered at us for an hour and a half. Thank God my own father only traveled there as chaperon once. It's one thing to change in the locker room, it's quite another to be talking to all of your male friends completely naked. Funny thing is that this did not bother me as much as the dirty old men leering at us from the sidelines did.

Not surprisingly, Boy Scout troops always have a spiritual leader and ours was a Catholic Priest, not from our Parish I might add, that never missed a trip to the good ole YMCA. I wonder what he was doing when he got home? Did anybody wonder why I quit the Boy Scouts by the time I was 14? I was just a little nervous around some of our community leaders.

That experience provided me with the knowledge that parents need to be very aware of their child's surroundings and not assume that a great organization, like the Boy Scouts is safe. Pedophiles flock to organizations such as this. I can't begin to tell you what else I learned in the Boy Scouts of America, but I need to keep this post as clean as possible. When my son was to travel on his first overnight (7 day outing) camping experience, I was quite concerned. I simply did not trust the troop leader and I felt that he liked looking at little boys a little too much. The camp director was a very good friend of mine and lived at the site. A week before my son's trip I took him to the camp and introduced him. My son was instructed that if he were uncomfortable for any reason, he should go to the director's house and I would be there shortly.

Well, nothing happened that he knew of on that trip. My wife called me paranoid. Two years after that trip and a year after my son left the Boy Scouts early, his Troop leader was arrested for molesting young boys.

Those are my Boy Scout high times - Mike Huckabee. In the end, I think my wife was quite impressed by my suspicious nature as was my son. I'm not saying that the Boy Scouts is a bad thing here; I am saying that some people's experience may not measure up to Huckabee's glorified view of the Boy Scout experience.

Maybe we are better off that Barack was not a Boy Scout? let's face it Mr. Huckabee, you don't think Barack Obama is a true American because he played basketball; you know, the sport that blacks like to play the most!

tomtoak