Mike Huckabee, a rightwing former Governor of Arkansas state, who considers himself a serious Republican challenger for the 2012 American presidential election and who the media takes seriously (he’s also host of a TV “news” show), made up lies about US President Barack Obama on a far-right radio show earlier this week. Obama is expected to be reelected easily and Republicans are now getting desperate.

Huckabee’s “facts” included that Obama “grew up” in Kenya and that he grew up with his father in Kenya. This is patently false; Obama grew up with his mother, in Hawaii and Indonesia. Obama only met his father in his early teens -once – in Hawaii. Not in Kenya. He only traveled to Kenya as a college student. And by then his father and grandfather had long passed. Obama wrote a book about it and someone later made a film about it.

And Huckabee is not alone in this. Wikipedia has a page dedicated to all the birther conspiracies about Obama. And it is long.

But more than the false claims of Obama’s birthplace are the claims about his political views. Huckabee claimed Obama shared his father and grandfather’s positive view of the Mau-Mau, the movement really known as the Land and Freedom Party (Mau Mau was a British slur) and at the head of the anticolonial struggle against British colonialism in Kenya.

The way Huckerbee and other Republicans (whether elected officials or the slew of talk show hosts or “commentators”) tell it being opposed to British colonialism is anti-American. And I thought the United States was born out of an anti-colonial struggle against British colonialism? The purpose with this baiting is that Huckabee is playing to a base for whom Kenya is equated with anti-American, i.e. not us, alien, “socialist,” and not white America. There’s tons of reputable sources (historians, journalists, fact checking websites, etcetera) debunking this racist nonsense daily in the United States, including some in the mainstream media, but it still sticks for some white Republicans. Last month a poll showed that half of all Republicans believe Obama was not born in the United States.

Anyway, I was wondering aloud how Kenya got this reputation in US politics, particularly on the Right.

Since independence Kenya’s leaders and political elites were basically pro-US, anti-Communist. More recently Kenya’s government have been firm supporters of the US’s War on Terror. So much so that for that support Kenyans have even been targeted by Al Quada bombers. Remember the US embassy bombings in Nairobi or the attacks on resorts there?

The only logic I could come up with is that the way the right delegitimizes Obama is to say he is not American after all. Since being Kenyan is not American, it must be socialist, anti-colonialist. Which is not American. And since they don’t read or check their own history, this is the kind of politics you get.