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Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day: Sarah Huckabee-Sanders - 2023 Update [1]
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Date: 2023-07-06
On this date in both 2021, as well as 2022, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” first profiled former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders, the political legacy that sprung from the Fundamentalist-kooky loins of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee While we had more than one person contact the blog to “nominate” Trump Administration Press Secretaries from about the point Sean Spicer wanted the American people to believe the Trump Inauguration was an attendance-shattering event, normally, we don’t profile appointees, only folks who are in elected office or seeking it. With Huckabee-Sanders trying to follow in her daddy’s Fundie footsteps as the latest GOP nepotism project, we’re obligated to do a deep-dive into her now, in the hopes we can have the equivalent of an intervention with Arkansas voters before they go and guarantee themselves a world of misery during her prospective tenure.
Let’s go back a bit farther, though… Sarah Huckabee-Sanders got her start working on political campaigns, and her only real successes were in Arkansas. Her father’s 2002 gubernatorial campagin? Win. As a field director for the Bush re-election campaign in ’04? Well, that was a win. In 2010, she worked on the re-election campaign for Senator John Boozman, and with the Tea Party Wave making that an easy win in any state, let alone one as red as Arkansas. Boozman didn’t even campaign at home at the time, he let Hucakbee-Sanders do it for him and defend the move by saying he was trying to stop the ACA from getting passed in Washington (and he won re-election, easily, despite mailing it in).
Now, let’s talk presidential campaign work… in 2008, Huckabee-Sanders helped lead her father to a 34% victory in the GOP’s Iowa Caucus, proving what bulls*** it is yet again (the winner of it since this year has not won the party’s nomination). Her dad’s campaign eventually fell to John McCain’s when he dropped out in March 2008, because, well, we’ve profiled Mike Huckabee and how truly nuts he is. In 2012, her father wasn’t running, so Huckabee-Sanders hitched her caboose onto the Tim Pawlenty campaign, and he bailed after their “all in on Iowa” strategy still only netted a third place finish in that year’s Ames Straw Poll, and he bailed, leaving her on the sidelines faster than in any year prior. How about in 2016? Was she on the Trump train? No, not at first, she was back working for her paw, and he dropped out after the Iowa Caucuses in February 2016 after getting only 1.8% of the vote.
About three weeks later and looking for a paycheck, the Trump 2016 campaign scooped her up to try and troubleshoot a problem they knew they were going to have going forward… how would a man so utterly immoral as Donald Trump ever win over Evangelical voters? Wouldn’t they rally around Ted Cruz, who flogs that horse like it owes him money? Well, using most of her father’s connections and friendships with Evangelical leaders, they twisted themselves in knots to justify why Trump was somehow not the devil incarnate, and with a little help from Vladimir Putin and social media not stopping lies in their tracks, Trump won the election and helped get Sarah Huckabee Sanders a job in the White House as Deputy Press Secretary.
Let us review a timeline of her most egregious lies and disturbing moments from a near two-year fascist propaganda spree:
May 5th, 2017: Deputy Press Secretary Huckabee-Sanders fills in for the first time at the White House Press Briefing for Press Secretary Sean Spicer for the first time.
May 10th, 2017: A day after Trump fires James Comey, the Director of the FBI, under sudden and dubious circumstances.
Huckabee-Sanders struggles against the press in the daily briefing, considering the historical precedent is compared to the actions of Richard Nixon that got him impeached. Desperately, she lies and claims that he had “lost the confidence from rank-and-file members of the FBI”, and that the White House received numerous e-mails from FBI staffers thanking them” for firing Comey. The opposite, of course, is true, and internal e-mails show the organization was appalled by it. Years of Freedom of Information Act requests about internal FBI e-mails proved her a liar, and she admitted as much as she left her post.
Huckabee-Sanders struggles against the press in the daily briefing, considering the historical precedent is compared to the actions of Richard Nixon that got him impeached. Desperately, she lies and claims that he had “lost the confidence from rank-and-file members of the FBI”, and that the White House received numerous e-mails from FBI staffers thanking them” for firing Comey. The opposite, of course, is true, and internal e-mails show the organization was appalled by it. Years of Freedom of Information Act requests about internal FBI e-mails proved her a liar, and she admitted as much as she left her post. June 16th, 2017: Without irony, while defending Donald Trump for the Comey firing, Huckabee-Sanders says, “No, I can definitively say the president is not a liar.” Which would require the public to ignore what’s been obvious for decades of him being a pathological liar.
June 27th, 2017: In the same White House Press Briefing, Huckabee-Sanders calls the assembled media “fake news” and then starts promoting a video created by James O’Keefe, a right-wing propagandist notorious for selectively editing videos to change the context deliberately.
June 29th, 2017: In another White House Press Hearing, Sarah Huckabee-Sanders claims Donald Trump “has in no way, form, or fashion ever promoted violence.” This ignores, of course, the times he offered to pay for legal fees for his followers if they attack his opponents, or the various number of ways he called for attacks on them should they even dare to speak out against him at his hate rallies on the campaign trail.
July 21st, 2017: Sarah Huckabee Sanders is officially named White House Press Secretary.
August 1st, 2017: Huckabee-Sanders, facing questions about Donald Trump Jr.’s statements to explain his meeting with Russians in Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign, and whether his father dictated his statement, says, “He certainly didn’t dictate, but he – like I said, he weighed in, offered suggestion like any father would do.” (Skip ahead to June 4th, 2018, where she is proven to have been lying.)
October 27th, 2017: Huckabee-Sanders is asked about the, at the time, count of 16 women who had accused Donald Trump of sexual assault, and she backs the president in accusing all of them of lying.
February 13th, 2018: Huckabee-Sanders is evasive in another White House Press Briefing when asked about Rob Porter’s resignation after it is discovered he had a criminal background with domestic violence and should never have been in the White House because the crime would have disqualified him on any background check. She and her Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah release conflicting statements if Porter resigned or was terminated from his job, and she said Porter’s background check was "ongoing, and the White House had not received any specific papers regarding the completion of that background check", but later had FBI Director Christopher Wray confirm that the background check had been completed.
March 7th, 2018: Huckabee-Sanders is placed out in front of the White House Press Corps to lie to them again, this time about the scandal where Trump has been caught paying for hush money towards buying the silence of women accusing him of cheating on his wife, and claims Trump “had no knowledge” of such a thing. As we would later learn, Trump knew, because his name is literally on the check.
June 4th, 2018: Sarah Huckabee-Sanders refuses to answer the media when they point out to her that she had told them months earlier that Donald Trump did not dictate to Donald Trump Jr. how to make his statement about speaking to Russians in Trump Tower during the 2020 presidential campaign. Among her terse, rambling responses were, "I’m not going to respond to a letter from the president’s outside counsel ... We’ve purposefully walled off, and I would refer you to them for comment", and, "I'm an honest person." Whatever you have to tell yourself to sleep at night like a proper sociopath.
June 14th, 2018: Sarah Huckabee-Sanders is in the midst of one of many press briefings where she is trying to square the Trump administration’s disastrous and cruel “family separation” policy, and she tries spinning it that it’s “biblical” to pull screaming migrant children away from their parents to be locked in cages. Because, well, she’s a self-righteous monster. As CNN’s Jim Acosta pushed back against her statement, she cut him off to insult him and say, “I know it’s hard for you to understand even short sentences I guess.” Her argument that “it’s biblical to follow the law” is also bulls***, because family separation was NOT in any way codified into law as the punishment for traveling illegally into the United States from another country. Finally sick of her antics, Brian Karem, a reporter from Playboy magazine, ends up taking the moral high ground to yell at the Press Secretary, “Come on Sarah, you’re a parent. Don’t you have any empathy for what these people are going through?” For a second, she appears visibly shaken.
June 22nd, 2018: Disgusted with her lies about children being locked in cages by the Trump Administration, while Sarah Huckabee-Sanders heads out to dinner in Lexington, Virginia, she is refused service by the Red Hen restaurant. She proceeds to, and stop me if this gets shocking, get on Twitter to use her profile to try and play the victim and shame THEM for refusing her. Donald Trump follows suit on Twitter the next day. Former Director of U.S. Office of Government Ethics Walter Shaub weighed in that Huckabee-Sanders had violated federal law.
September 27th, 2018: From the White House Press Secretary’s podium, Huckabee-Sanders attacks the credibility of the multiple accusers coming forward to talk about being sexually assaulted or harassed by Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The lie in this instance that the other accusers who weren’t Christine Blasey Ford “refused” to speak to the Senate Judiciary Committee about Kavanaugh, but the truth is, the Senate did not allow them to testify.
October 17th, 2018: Huckabee-Sanders tries lying about the family separation policy again, and claims that “75% of the kids actually self-separated”, which is some next-level gaslighting of the American people.
January 30th, 2019: Huckabee-Sanders proclaims her belief, without irony, that God “wanted Donald Trump to be president”, which unless it’s in the context that he’s being inflicted upon someone evil like one of the plagues of Egypt, we don’t want to give any credence to.
March 11th, 2019: Asked to square comments from Donald Trump that “Democrats hate Jewish people” (which, no, they don’t, and last time we checked, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer at the time would be a big piece of evidence against that fact), Sarah Huckabee Sanders is harangued at a press briefing about his past comments on Charlottesville and his failure to condemn white nationalists, so she finds a new level of dead inside to say, “The president has been incredibly clear and consistently and repeatedly condemned hatred, bigotry, racism in all of its forms, whether it's in America or anywhere else, and to say otherwise is simply untrue."
April 19th, 2019: E-mails are released to the public regarding the firing of former FBI Director James Comey that prove Sarah Huckabee-Sanders lied to the American people regarding the incident.
June 13th, 2019: After a 23 months of gaslighting the American people, Sarah Huckabee-Sanders resigns as White House Press Secretary. She was being paid a taxpayer salary for her last 94 days on the job where she refused to hold even a single press conference. She only held four press briefings within her final 200 days on the job, and eight in the last 300.
August 22nd, 2019: Where else can a seasoned liar with a victim complex like Huckabee-Sanders get a career opportunity, but taking a job at Fox News.
And so we summarize all of the above by pointing out how hypocritically cruel Sarah Huckabee-Sanders is. She can straight-up lie to the American people about the Mueller Investigation, lie about James Comey’s firing, lie about Stormy Daniel’s payoff, and lie about Brett Kavanaugh, but when Michelle Wolf jokes about her trying to make lying somehow glamorous, she bleats about being the victim and tries to get a rising star’s career killed. She can be a part of an administration that’s tearing children away from their families, preventing them from having proper legal representation, shoving them in cages and to live in cramped, diseased conditions… but if someone denies her a chicken sandwich, she wants their business shuttered. She insists she’s honest, and wanted to put her best foot forward as Press Secretary when she spent her entire tenure berating any reporter who wasn’t from Fox, OANN, or Newsmax for daring to ask her a question… and then would run to her “safe space” on Fox News rather than even face journalists who might actually ask her a question she didn’t like.
[END]
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