Former Gov. Mike Huckabee; my hat is off to the guy.

I have always liked Mike Huckabee, someone my father accurately describes as folksy. One of my early posts about him was from his YouTube discussion of pardoning Keith Richards.

And then I did a post on his "which one" comment in early January entitled: "I love it: During a debate Saturday, Romney accused Huckabee of mischaracterizing his position on the war in Iraq. 'Which one?' Huckabee shot back."

And then one of my favorites was also in January and was entitled: "Huckabee calls himself a threat to GOP elites."

But these and my other posts on Huckabee pale in comparison with comments he recently made on MSNBC as brought to my attention by the AJC's Political Insider.

Such comments by Gov. Huckabee remind me of the Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson movie A Few Good Men, when, at the end of the movie, the corporal who had just been court marshalled said -- while a group was standing in the presence of Navy lawyer Tom Cruise -- "Ten-hut. An officer is on deck!"

The following is from the AJC's Political Insider (and the MSNBC link has the MSNBC interview with Gov. Huckabee):

After a long, well-earned vacation, Mike Huckabee showed up on television this week.

He’s no longer a presidential candidate. But he remains the Republican of an unpredictable stripe. Huckabee appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday.

Below is the generous analysis that Huckabee — remember that he’s done time as a Southern Baptist pastor — gave of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s speech on race.

And while he didn’t defend the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s statements, Huckabee did try to put them in context.

But the former Arkansas governor, who carried Georgia in the February primary, also spoke as someone who grew up in the segregated South, and his observations at the very bottom of the transcript that follows are what might surprise you.

Huckabee said:

”Obama has handled this about as well as anybody could. And I agree, it’s a very historic speech. I think that it was an important one, and one that he had to deliver. And he couldn’t wait. The sooner he made it, maybe the quicker that this becomes less of the issue. Otherwise, it was the only thing that was the issue in his entire campaign. And I thought he handled it very, very well.

“And he made the point, and I think it’s a valid one, that you can’t hold the candidate responsible for everything around him that people may say or do. You just can’t, whether it’s me, whether it’s Obama, or anybody else.

“But he did distance himself from the very vitriolic statements. Now, the second story — it’s interesting to me that there are some people on the left that are having to be very uncomfortable with what [Jeremiah] Wright said when they were all over a Jerry Falwell or anyone on the right who said things that they found very awkward and uncomfortable years ago.

“Many times those were statements lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. Sermons, after all, are rarely written word-for-word by pastors like Reverend Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you’d say, ‘Well, I probably didn’t mean to say it quite like that……’

“And one other thing I think we’ve got to remember.

“As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say ‘That’s a terrible statement’ — I grew up in a very segregated South.

“And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m going to be probably the only conservative in America who’s going to say something like this, but I’m just telling you — we’ve got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie, you have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant, you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus.

“And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment, and you have to just say, ‘I probably would, too.’”