Walking The Line: The Company That Mike Huckabee Keeps

Yesterday, Tim Murphy of Mother Jones wrote a good piece about Mike Huckabee's ties to Janet Porter which noted that "Huckabee's greatest asset has always been his ability to speak two languages—one to his base, and one to everyone else."

This is absolutely true, in that Huckabee has managed to develop a reputation as an affable, reasonable Republican in the media while simultaneously maintaining and establishing deep relationships with figures who inhabit the outer fringes of the Religious Right.

And nothing better exemplifies this than the fact that he dedicated a segment on a recent episode of his Fox News television program to discussing the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden ... and he brought on retired General Jerry Boykin as his expert:

Now, the segment itself contains nothing too extreme ... and that is exactly what makes it a perfect demonstration of how Huckabee manages to walk this line. 

After all, if Huckabee brought Boykin on to his Fox program so that he could talk about how he retired from the military after he was caught declaring that the US was engaged in a holy war against Islam and how, since that time, he has become a professional anti-Islam activist and teamed up with self-proclaimed prophet Rick Joyner to form a Spartan-like Christian army that can withstand President Obama's Marxist attempts to create an army of Brownshirts loyal only to him ... well, that just might undermine Huckabee's own well-crafted reputation for aw-shucks reasonableness, now wouldn't it?