I could almost not believe what I was reading when I saw this Reuter’s article.  Of note was this quote:

WASHINGTON, Dec 12 (Reuters Life!) – Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said he considers his rival Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith a religion, not a cult, but questioned whether Mormons believe “Jesus and the devil are brothers.”

Huckabee raised the question on his own in an interview to appear in The New York Times magazine on Sunday, and ignited a new flap in the up-for-grabs race to be the Republican Party’s nominee in the November 2008 presidential election.

This struck me as  noteworthy for a variety of reasons.  First, why is Reuters reporting on this?  What Huckabee thinks about Mormonism is totally unrelated to his ability to become president.  One might argue that if he is prejudiced against Mormons then he is not fit for office, but if we truly believe that there is a separation of church and state, Huckabee’s religious beliefs (both his own and what he thinks about others), should not be relevant.

Second, it makes Huckabee look stupid, which admittedly isn’t hard, but one would think that he would try and avoid that.  30 seconds spent on the internet looking up the tenets of the Mormon faith would have clarified this point for him.

Third, this was political pandering and mud slinging at its worst.  Numerous polls have shown that people are both scared of and ignorant of the Mormon faith.  This was a cheap shot that he could afford to take, because most Americans would just take his quote and use it to affirm their belief that Mormons are a weird group.  Furthermore, his attack of Mormons was particlarly safe and cowardly because they are a minority group.  Given this nation’s huge number of Baptists it would be political suicide for Romney to point out and of the idiocy of Huckabee’s faith.

Now personally I think that Mormons are just the same amount of crazy as Christians, and Jews (maybe not quite as crazy as Muslims), so I’m not defending them because I care about them.  My point is that these types of things should be kept out of politics.  The news media should not reward this type of idiocy.  It makes political sense that Huckabee does this, but it is pure Huckster-ism.  Huckster… Huckabee… hmm…