Yglesias prompted me to read David Brooks’ column on Mike Huckabee. America America aw shucks apparently-not-diabolical. Fine. But what’s this?
[Huckabee] tells audiences that the only soap his family could afford was the rough Lava soap, and that he was in college before he realized showering didnât have to hurt. “There are people paying $150 for an exfoliation,” he jokes. “I could just hand them a bar of Lava soap.”
He’s right about one thing: Lava soap is pretty rough. My dad often had some of their products around the house for cleaning grease off of his hands, and it was definitely not something you’d use without noticing. But that’s because it’s supposed to be that way — it’s got little bits of pumice mixed in.
Anyway what’s this bullshit about it being cheap? Lava is a highly specialized utility soap, and one would expect it to command a premium. Clearly, this calls for some internet research. I compared prices for Lava versus Irish Spring — a nice, middle-of-the-road soap used by right-thinking Americans such as myself. A NOTE ON METHODOLOGICAL RIGOR: Lava is mostly sold as single bars. On the web, Irish Spring tends to be sold in 3-packs, so I’ve divided its prices by the number of bars. Surely a hardscrabble, cost-conscious family like the Huckabees would’ve bought in bulk.
| Lava | Irish Spring | |
|---|---|---|
| Drugstore.com | $1.99 | $0.88 |
| Amazon | $1.40 | $0.81 |
| CVS | Only sells patriotic soap | $0.83 |
| Rite-Aid | Only sells body wash, apparently. | |
The best price I could find for Lava was on Amazon — if you buy the 48-pack you can get it for $0.89/bar. But that’s still more expensive than retail amounts of Irish Spring, and the package is suspiciously green. If you’re really looking for budget soap you can do considerably better than that. Or you could simply pass horse urine through straw and mix with lard. You do slaughter your own pigs, don’t you?
So what can we conclude from all of this? I think there are two possibilities. Either Mike Huckabee is a compulsive liar and therefore completely unfit for office; or the Huckabee family has some sort of hereditary economic disability. The latter could perhaps account for his otherwise inexplicable enthusiasm for raising taxes sometimes, slightly. Either way, it’s important that he be exposed for the confused old man and/or transparent fraud that he is. Has anything been done with the word “Huckster” yet?
This is the most obviously despicable campaign trail behavior since John Kerry’s 2004 cheesesteak pandering. I expect the next Youtube debate to feature AT LEAST one soap-related question.
You’ve blown it wide open, Tommy: What the hell with Rite-Aid and the body wash? What’s a man got to do to buy a bar of Dial (presuming he doesn’t want to walk two blocks in either direction on U from 13th)? The fact that Rite-Aid resembles a Cuban commissary isn’t dispositive proof that the company is run by an Ahmadinejad-Chavez-Putin “axis of loofah”—but we shouldn’t discount the possibility.
Perhaps his father was a mechanic, and the lava soap was a business write-off. Of course, in that case we’re looking at tax fraud on a massive scale, so let’s hope not.
Tommy, I think we all know that Rite-Aid sells all manner of soap. You just wanted to show off your adeptness at coding non-standard html tables.
Consider yourself busted.
Not so! And check out their online operation: no soap for sale. If it isn’t on the internet, it doesn’t exist.
Shouldn’t you be checking in to what Lava cost back when Huckabee was a child? I’m pretty sure $1.50 a bar would have been practically obscene by the standards of the 1950s.
But how could you check the internet prices of the ’50′s.
I’m pretty sure Al Gore hadn’t invented the internet yet and the tubes were still trucks back then.
Just sayin’
Check those dollar stores for a deal.
I get mine for 50 cents. Just sayin’.
I was around in those days and I’m certain that Lava was more expensive than regular soap back then, too.
Maybe an enterprising blogger could check out some old newspaper ads on microfilm.
We used it too when I was a kid. We were too poor to get anything other than (needed) clothing for Christmas. We used lava soap a lot. It lasts a long time.
So you say:
What do you think of our current administration, then? Mixed feelings, I’d expect?
Lava is cheap because you steal it from work!
Microzide…
An interesting post by a bloger made me ……