Mike Huckabee 2016? It has quietly started.

Mike Huckabee 2016?

Mike Huckabee 2016?

Ready for a Mike Huckabee 2016 run for the White House?  I suspect one is in the works, at least the preliminarily groundwork.

Each week, the software running this blog site automatically checks all the links in every post, looking for broken links. Just this past Friday, the broken link report pointed to a post from June, 2013–DOMA Ruling Brings Out Theocrats in Droves. Specifically, the report indicated that links to two tweets, which Mr. Huckabee posted shortly after the DOMA ruling, were now broken.

Following the June 2013 Supreme Court ruling, heralded by The Wall Street Journal as a “historic win for gay marriage”, Mr. Huckabee tweeted:

My thoughts on the SCOTUS ruling that determined that same sex marriage is okay: “Jesus wept.”

And again, a few minutes later to further clarify:

“5 people in robes said they are bigger than the voters of CA and Congress combined. And bigger than God. May He forgive us all.”

It appears that both of these tweets, which I linked to in my old post, have recently been deleted from Mr. Huckabee’s Twitter feed. Why would someone go back and delete tweets that are well over a year old?

I suspected Mr. Huckabee’s people were cleaning house in anticipation of a Mike Huckabee 2016 campaign. Much has changed in terms of LGBT rights since 2013. It may be the case that Mr. Huckabee realizes that by a year from now, many of his comments from 2013 and earlier may sound rather extreme, even to potential Mike Huckabee 2016 voters.

Corroborating Evidence

To further test this hypothesis, I headed first to Google, and quickly found Mr. Huckabee’s web site. I asked Google to search that site for the word “DOMA”:

Google search for "DOMA" on Mike Huckabee web site

The second result (highlighted) caught my eye because it was dated June 29, 2013–shortly after the Supreme Court ruling. However clicking on that result in Google yielded a “page not found” message on Mr. Huckabee’s web site:

404 on Mike Huckabee web site

So, just like the tweets I had linked to, this post on the subject of DOMA from the same time period has also been deleted. And deleted rather recently, because Google, as of right now, is still returning it as a valid search result.  (Google periodically updates its indices to eliminate no-longer-available pages, but it has yet noticed that this page is gone.)

Going Wayback

Next I headed to the Internet Archive–also known as The Wayback Machine–to see if I could find a copy of the now-deleted search result. I searched for the page shown in Google and found two results, one backed up on July 12, 2013, and a second backed up two days later. Both showed the date of the post as June 29, 2013, just as Google had indicated.

As you can see from the archived page, My Monologue From The Weekend Show, Mr. Huckabee had some pretty strong (albeit, poorly written) words on the subject. Words that may not fit smoothly into a presidential campaign. For example, on multiple occasions, Mr. Huckabee refers to the Supreme Court as the “Extreme Court”; He speaks repeatedly of Biblical law, the wisdom of God and Jesus, and how equality means “intrinsic worth” of individuals rather than “sameness” under the law.

The Extreme Court has “did it” again. [sic] This week, they decided that the voters of California nor God almighty Himself were as wise as they were. While I understand the technical legal nature of their decision, the effect was to ignore a substantial majority of voters in California who twice affirmed the Biblical, historical, and natural law definition of marriage of one man/one woman.

And this week, for those of us who believe God created male and female, and who believe what Jesus said that a man shall leave his father and mother and a woman shall leave her home and the two will become one flesh, they were wrong again.

Equality means intrinsic worth and value and would guarantee one’s right to vote, rent or buy a house, go to school, or receive medical care. But equality of worth doesn’t create sameness. There are differences between men and women, and votes of Congress nor the Extreme Court can change that. [sic]

And this week, for those of us who believe God created male and female, and who believe what Jesus said that a man shall leave his father and mother and a woman shall leave her home and the two will become one flesh, they were wrong again.

Mike Huckabee 2016

It seems more than a coincidence that Mr. Huckabee’s tweets and his blogged monologue, all posted shortly after the June 2013 Supreme Court’s DOMA ruling, have now each been deleted, all within a small time span. There appears to be a deliberate effort underway to rewrite–or at least reword–Mr. Huckabee’s reaction and response to Supreme Court’s DOMA ruling.

Again, why would he do this now, more than a year after the fact? Answer: Mike Huckabee 2016 campaign preparation.

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