Huckabee's an Asshole

It's not like that's news, I know. But this guy is a real Grade-A Asshole, which becomes ever more apparent with every story I read about him. To wit:

Republican Mike Huckabee took his presidential campaign for a quick pheasant-hunting expedition in Iowa on Wednesday, and at one point, a reporter asked why he hadn't invited sporting enthusiast Dick Cheney along. "Because I want to survive all the way through this," Huckabee replied, in a chuckling dig at the vice president’s accidental shooting of a quail-hunting partner last year.

Any good sportsman, though, couldn't miss a distinctly Cheneyesque moment in the press accounts of the former Arkansas governor's morning hunt: At one point, Huckabee's party turned toward a cluster of reporters and cameramen and, when they kicked up a pheasant, fired shotgun blasts over the group's heads.

...My colleague James Oliphant reports that Huckabee's party was about 75 yards away from the press corps Wednesday when a pheasant jumped up and flew toward the reporters, drawing several shots. "That was too close," he reports a cameraman saying.

...Huckabee emerged happily from his hunt, three dead pheasants in tow, Oliphant reports. Asked for a metaphor to describe the hunt, he replied, "Don't get in my way. This is what happens."

Asshole.

The gobsmacking thing about this level of inveterate assholery is that Huckabee is running as the nice guy among the GOP candidates. He's the freaking minister among them, who's supposed to be "too nice" according to hard-scrabble GOP operatives, despite stories like this one describing his being a total asshole and assholery like letting loose a serial rapist who graduated to rape-murder. He's the nice one among this bunch of lunatics, and he's recklessly disregarding basic hunting safety to shoot "too close" to reporters and then flippantly joking about it.

Jebus. The GOP is quite a collection of jerks, if this is their Nice Guy.