This man is awfully good at smirking

[contextly_sidebar id="fWfFzm2kYN7SDUR8vcZ5N6tog6FZFsys"]Alleged presidential candidate Mike Huckabee offered a surprising assessment of the man arrested for shooting up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs and killing three people, calling the shooter a "domestic terrorist." It is not yet known whether Huckabee was feverish at the time he made the statement, or if he had simply not received the memo explaining that all white mass shooters are "mentally unbalanced."

Huckabee tweeted on Sunday that the "Colorado Springs tragedy is domestic terrorism, especially for those us [sic] in the pro-life movement" and repeated the phrase on CNN as well. After CNN's Brianna Keilar noted that the murderer reportedly told police, "No more baby parts" after his arrest, Huckabee carefully backed away from the possibility that the killer was motivated by "pro-life" views, while also condemning the murders:

Well, we don't know fully what the facts are. They're still being determined. We don't even know some of the victims' names yet. But regardless of why he did it, what he did is domestic terrorism, and what he is did is absolutely abominable, especially to those of us in the pro-life movement, because there's nothing about any of us that would condone or in any way look the other way at something like this [...]

It was mass murder. It was absolutely unfathomable. And there's no excuse for killing other people, whether it's happening inside the Planned Parenthood headquarters, inside their clinics where many millions of babies die, or whether it's people attacking Planned Parenthood. We ought to value life. Every life truly does have worth and value.

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Nice to know that even though Planned Parenthood is by far the worst mass murderer, Huck's still against killing people who work there. He went on to deny even the slightest possibility of a link between increased threats against Planned Parenthood and those lying videos claiming that Planned Parenthood sells aborted baby parts under the table at seedy cantinas. He insisted he didn't know of "any pro-life leader" who favors violence against abortion clinics or their employees, and asked Keilar to correct him if she knew of any. Apparently, neither had heard of Operation Rescue, whose leader, Troy Newman, recently endorsed Ted Cruz and who argued in 2003 that abortion providers should be put to death. The organization's senior vice president, Cheryl Sullenger, did time in federal prison for attempting to bomb an abortion clinic. Maybe Newman doesn't count since he said the government should do the executions after trials, so it would be all legal-like, not a rogue vigilante action ... which Newman also has argued could be defended as justifiable homicide. And maybe Sullenger doesn't count either, because she never actually killed anyone.

[contextly_sidebar id="MHTRfIiudCuD2XWp4IbAZzXvjwLGwpti"]Still, calling the shootings at Planned Parenthood "domestic terrorism" is quite a change for Huckabee, who insisted just last week that Christians don't do terrorism:

Bomb-throwing Baptists, Anglican arsonists, or radicalized Roman Catholics don’t commit these atrocities—radical Islamic jihadists do.

Clearly, if he gets called on this, Huckabee will insist that the Colorado Springs terrorist wasn't a real Christian, even though Robert L. Dear's former wife told the New York Times:

[He] was religious but not a regular churchgoer, a believer but not one to harp on religion. “He believed wholeheartedly in the Bible,” she said. “That’s what he always said; he read it cover to cover to cover.” But he was not fixated on it, she added.

Still, what with the murder and all, not a good Christian.

Huckabee went on in the interview to complain that Barack Obama has "shown considerably more intensity of anger toward Republicans than he has toward ISIS," and that he wished the president could somehow get worked up over something other than Syrian refugees. As long as it's not the easy availability of guns. Huck doesn't want Obama getting angry about that, either.

[CNN / NBC / RightWingWatch / NYT]