Is Salon now sorry that it spent months promoting this intolerant fraud as the "nice, acceptable" Republican?

I'm shocked. SHOCKED.

A Republican candidate with anti-gay views? A Southern Baptist minister who expresses regressive, stupid opinions regarding the "homosexual lifestyle"?! A right-winger coming out as opposed to TEH GAY?!?

Lead me to my fainting couch...!

Oh well. Like a dead mackerel, exposure of Mike Huckabee and his record to light and air will expose his overwhelming hateful stench. Like Giuliani's. Or Romney's. Or Tancredo's. Or....

Bad times to be a Republican, I'd say.

It's becoming increasingly clear that Huckabee is the white knight that Repugs have been looking for... a Christian fascist who throws bones to the moderates every now and then, and might, just might, be on the verge of convincing everyone that he's a compassionate conservative, like W in 2000. Except he's smarter than W. Maybe.

Then take a look over at the Democratic side, where the White Witch is steamrolling to the nomination, notwithstanding the excitement among us little people for Barack Obama. She's going to get the Democratic nomination, and then she's going to get horsewhipped by Huckabee. Because she's the only thing better than gays and abortion at getting Republicans to the voting booth.

And then we'll have a Southern Baptist preacher for president, a man who once wrote and apparently still believes that HIV patients (read: gay people) should be put into concentration camps.

How hard is it for an American to get Canadian citizenship??

I guess when you are trailing in the GOP polls you can be a nice guy...as soon as you need to defend your frontrunner status, you need to show yourself to be the small minded bigot that the Christian Right craves.

The current of anti-gay bigotry in the right is strong and deep, even if this particular candidate is trying to pass himself off as kindler and gentler, or- as you might say- a "uniter and not a divider".

After building up an unknown, it will now be time to play "gotcha of the day" by taking digging into their record.

How nice that folks here have chosen to depict his words as meaning he wanted people in concentration camps.

There *was* national debate about how to treat Aids and whether or not the health issue justified disclosing a patient's illness. I am sure many people have altered they thinking about AIDs in the past 15 years.

He doesn't deserve demonization. Save that crap for the truly evil bigots out there like Fred Phelps, for pete's sake.

Every time someone denounces homosexuality as a "lifestyle" conducive to spreading disease, I want to ask them: What about lesbians? Lesbians are at the lowest risk of transmitting or contracting STDs of virtually *any* segment of the U.S. population. If AIDS is God's way of punishing sin, what should I deduce from that about lesbianism?

You were right the first time when you placed Huckabee friendly to the gays and now we must add to that his friendliness with the prison, green, "little guy" and immigrate community. Over the years he has soften from some of his hard line positions in the early 90's. As for the paroles he must really practise forgivness! Hollywood should love him for that! They are forever trying to free the prison imates. Surely you would not hold his early mistaken positions of entry to politics against him. This gentleman has taken on the Republican/elite establishment and you guys ought to love him for that! Wall street Republicans are working over time to see that he is not the Republican nominee in spite of his silly flat tax position that they know and you and I know would go no where in the belt way. Yes he is a progressive social conservative. Does that confuse you?...smiling.... That's what I like about him and some of your media friends.

Jerry King

Say they had done what he said and isolated all the people known to have AIDS. What would have happened? Do you think that there would quite possibly be a lot less people with AIDS in the US? Despite all the condoms and education, AIDS is still going strong.

"Instead, he focuses on the confusion that remained in 1992 about the threat of AIDS, a confusion harbored mainly by those who had failed to educate themselves about the science."

Of course he did not educate himself about the science, nice Mr. Huckabee is a creationist. Creationists ignore science in preference to scripture-period- end of sentence. This is EXACTLY the kind of behind the times leadership we would get from him as President. Scary, very scary. I thought W's lack of critical thinking & ignorance of B&W scientific fact was scary - but I actually think this guy would be worse.

I don't blame gay folks for their reaction to Huckabee one bit. I share their revulsion over his comments. Now that the focus is on "living with HIV" (which, in and of itself is not a bad thing) there is a huge collective amnesia about the political landscape in the 80s and early 90s where AIDS was concerned. Those of us who were around at the height of the plague years and watched our friends and colleagues die--quickly and horribly--need to remind people how it really was. The real story? Suggesting that PWAs and HIV positive people be herded into camps was a radically conservative stance even in the dark, pre-cocktail days of the early years. Huckabee isn't the only politician to have suggested it. But collective horror over the idea, which inspired both an organized campaign of public education and dramatic protests, prevented it from happening the first time around.

Saying "we didn't know better in '92" is utter bullshit. Plenty of people knew forced quarantine wasn't the answer then and said so in no uncertain terms.

Huckabee was an intolerant religious nutcase then and he is an intolerant religious nutcase now.

How nice that you think there's nothing wrong with putting people in concentration camps. Oh, wait -- that's not nice, that's abominable. Just like Mike Huckabee and all of his ilk.

kufir77, the Nazis "isolating" the Jewish population had the immediate result of "a lot less" Jews, but it was no more a "final solution" for the people Hitler hated than for the people you hate. Because of condoms and education -- and despite the best efforts of people like you -- the communities most affected by HIV/AIDS are still going strong.

However, despite condoms and education, we still have you -- but the difference between the good guys and you is we're not saying you should be put in a concentration camp.