Former Arkansas Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has been slammed for raising taxes, commuting the sentence of a prisoner who ended up committing murder, and failing to successfully take on conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, wants to outlaw the term “RINO.”
In a Facebook post, he whined about conservatives who attack Republicans for not being “pure” enough.
“One term that I’d like to see outlawed from the vernacular of the party is ‘RINO,'” Huckabee wrote on his Facebook page on Monday. “It stands for Republicans in Name Only, and it’s a pejorative term that questions the authenticity and orthodoxy of someone’s party purity. I’ve been called that myself, even though I fought in the trenches of Republican politics for over two decades. Even so, I would never pretend that I’m Lord over determining who the real Republicans are.”
He then said many Republicans would call Abraham Lincoln a RINO.
After questioning whether conservatives “really want to save America,” he said they should “be focusing on their real differences with the left, not committing fratricide.”
“Personally, I think someone who agrees with me 90% of the time is not my enemy,” he wrote. “I’d rather have a loyal dog that licks me than one with a pedigree that bites me. I’d rather go into battle with someone who isn’t perfect than with someone who thinks he is.”
Though Huckabee praised the Tea Party for focusing on limited government, he did not mention the $50 million establishment groups like the Chamber of Commerce will spend along with other groups – like Karl Rove’s Crossroads and former establishment Rep. Steve LaTourette’s Republican Main Street Partnership – to wage war on the Tea Party.