Huckabee's racist ties

I thought it was a little strange when Mike Huckabee picked up his electric bass and played "Sweet Home Alabama" the night of the Iowa primary. So it wasn't all that surprising to learn that Huck has been pandering to South Carolina racists by defending the confederate flag.

SHA is Lynyrd Skynyrd's answer song to Neil Young's "Southern Man" and has been named of the 50 greatest conservative rock songs by the National Review

The lyrics say

Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A Southern man don't need him around anyhow

[They also extoll George Wallace and minimize Watergate]

Pretty much echoes Huck's stance on the Confederate flag.

What I didn't know was that the Huckster has a long relationship with the neo-confederate movement. Max Blumenthal discusses the connection on the Nation website

well before he was a nationally known political star, Huckabee nurtured a relationship with America's largest white supremacist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens. The extent of Huckabee's interaction with the racist group is unclear, but this much is known: he accepted an invitation to speak at the group's annual conference in 1993 and ultimately delivered a videotaped address that was "extremely well received by the audience."

The person behind the independent ads promoting the Huckster's flag stance is a neo-confederate. According to Right Wing Watch

a belated Civil War battle is being fought in this year’s Republican primary in South Carolina. But if advocates of flying the Confederate battle flag over the state capitol hope to convince people it’s unrelated to racism, they could hardly have a worse spokesman than Ron Wilson.

Wilson is the man behind the eloquently-named Americans for the Preservation of American Culture, which is running radio ads lambasting John McCain and Mitt Romney for their stances on the flag issue while praising Mike Huckabee.

The Southern Poverty Law Center says

Wilson is a former member of the League of the South and the Council of Conservative Citizens, both hate groups. His education expertise is limited to the business he ran out of his home selling textbooks to home-schoolers. One of these, Barbarians Inside the Gates, theorized that Jews are working towards world domination — and was specially touted by Wilson's Web site, which insisted, "You MUST READ THIS BOOK."

In his role heading the 32,000-member SCV, Wilson was part of a takeover attempt by extremists, and led efforts to purge more than 300 members for publicly condemning racism in the SCV. Since Wilson left that post in August 2004, the SCV has started to implode as the raging internal controversy continues.

Note: The intention of Lynyrd Synyrd in making Sweet Home Alabama may not have been racist as this webpage argues, but it can be a good indicator.