The amount of space between nutcase fringe conservative conspiracy theorists gathering information from the fillings in their teeth and actual "serious" Republican presidential candidates slides
ever closer to zero.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee says President Obama has “extraordinary disdain” for Israel and such disdain originates from his own sense of identity and sympathy for the “other Middle Eastern nations.”
This of course would be a slight retweaking of the
Obama is a secret Muslim and the
Obama is not a true American theories, all of which postulate that the sitting president is actually a plant who does not "love America" but who instead owes allegiance to outside forces and nations. It is also a racist theory. Yes, there is much debate on that point—on whether the Mike Huckabees of the world have embraced this theory as the thinnest possible veneer over the underlying premise that the first non-white American president is
illegitimate or
false or
insufficiently American, or whether they are saying it merely because they are stupid—but Huckabee himself does his best to clarify it.
“I think he resents the strength of Israel. I think he resents very much the strength of Benjamin Netanyahu, who is absolutely forthright in his understanding of what the threats are with Islamic jihadism, a term that President Obama cannot bring himself to utter, nor can his administration.”
But of course the George W. Bush administration spent considerable effort separating his administration's fight against groups like Al Qaeda from a fight against either Islam itself or "Islamic" forces, and it was generally considered to be a (surprisingly) wise move, an effort both to tamp down on bigotry against the wider Muslim population and to very specifically delegitimize the terrorists' own claims to be the true leaders of Islam. Separating terrorist groups from religious legitimacy within their own borders is a key element of isolating them and degrading whatever popular support they may garner. The number of conservatives who believed the George W. Bush administration was doing this because George Bush and Dick Cheney "resent Israel" was, outside of Alex Jones-ish circles, rather low. There were indeed people who were irate that George Bush was using such restrained language to refer to the Worldwide Muslim Menace, but those people were racists and skinheads and people who wanted to nuke Muslim populations for decades and for no particular reason.
Mike Huckabee now supposes that the precise method by which President George W. Bush attempted to isolate and delegitimize terrorist groups is, when repeated by President Barack Obama, evidence that the president identifies with Muslim nations and resents Israel. That version of the secret Muslim theory isn't subtle. It's not a quiet little dog whistle to the racist base, it's openly pandering to them.