Huckabee Puts Faith in President, Easter Eggs
“Just because you didn’t find every Easter egg doesn’t mean that it wasn’t planted.” So said Mike Huckabee about the lack of WMDs in Iraq at the Thursday night Republican debate in Florida. He then later suggested in an interview that the missing weapons had been secreted into Jordan. That would probably come as a shock to King Abdullah. Huckabee distinguished himself from the remaining four Republican candidates in the race by being the only one to recycle this particular piece of jingoist fiction, and he was also alone in explicitly defending preventive war as such. The four pro-war candidates all agreed that the war was “worth” the lives lost and the hundreds of billions spent, but none was so specific in giving credit to the President: “I think we owe him not a lot of scorn, we owe him our thanks, that he had the courage to recognize that there was a potential of weapons of mass destruction.”
Huckabee’s foreign policy is a study in contradictions, largely because Huckabee has never made a study of foreign policy. Sane, non-alarmist observations about the significant role of the military in Pakistani affairs exist side by side with bizarre exhortations to send Americans into Waziristan. One moment he, the “Christian leader,” will speak about the faith that “defines” him, and then will call for the expulsion of the Palestinians into Egypt, a sort of reverse Exodus that would relocate the Palestinian Christian inhabitants of the Holy Land and largely obliterate the native Christian presence in the places where Christ walked. He consorts with John Hagee (founder of Christians United for Israel), who gloried in the IAF’s bombardment of Lebanon, but at the same time Huckabee has somehow been mistaken for someone who wants to “be nice” to everyone around the world. Lost in a sea of bad analogies and hokey references is the occasional piece of wisdom: “We have an unfortunate tendency to confuse leaders with their countries and their citizens and to back them for too long, with too few questions asked and too few strings attached.” If only Huckabee had as much insight when it came to countries being targeted for invasion as he had with allied states, he might not be so resolutely pro-war.
Comments
I picked up on this also. Huckabee sounded like some nutcase at Free Republic ranting on about WMDs that were secreted away and the glories of pre-emptive war. None of the other pro-War candidates were silly enough to repeat that defense from a bygone era. Heck, half the pro-War blood lusters at <i>Free Republic<> don’t even go down that road anymore.
I was stunned by this. It is like Huckabee is still reading the talking points from two or three years ago. This was a massive blunder. I have some sympathy for Huckabee based on the very revealing anti-Huck hysteria of the establishmentcons that accompanied his earlier rise. But as much as I hate to say it, he really is a rube. This strikes me as “See, I really am tough on the ‘Islamofascists.’ Really, I am.”
Someone needs to slip him a note. “Gov. Huckabee, we’ve moved on from this. These days you are supposed to warn ominously of the dire consequences to the region of our precipitous withdrawal, and dismiss any criticism of the original invasion as talking about the past.”
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I guess it’s official,
Huckster is a Dispensational Conspiracist.
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I wonder if any of the other candidates have learned anything from ron paul. I mean literally learned facts abuot the economy and foreign policy that they didn’t know. just from the debates. like if mitt romney walks around going “man, so THAT’s what interest rates mean”
i think the problem is all these guys, especially Mcain, came of age politically in the 80-2000 era when we didn’t really have any problems at least on the surface. so the accent shifted to personalities and “experience”.
the fact is besides paul, all the candidates are interchangeable, they all sound and think the same so it doesn’t really matter which one is elected.
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Huckabee is a televangelist type. He wants you to believe what he believes even though he doesn’t really believe what he says he believes.
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When your this ignorant about an important issue like WMDs and Iraq, you shouldn’t be president for one; and two, you are easy prey for manipulation by neocon foreign policy experts. If God forbid Huckabee gets into White House, we are looking at 4 more years of George W. Bush-type foreign policy.
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Nothing illustrates the absurdity and dishonesty of
the pro-war argument more than the speculation that
Saddam moved the fabled “weapons of mass destruction”
to Syria, Iran, France, Mars ... wherever. In the
propaganda leading up to the invasion, we were warned
that military action had to be taken immediately
before the fanatical and irrational Saddam Hussein
lobbed nuclear bombs at us or Israel. If this
portrait was accurate, why didn’t the deranged
dictator use these awful devices against the invading
armies or other targets of his enemies once his back
was up against the wall? What possible good did
moving them out of Iraq do him at that point? Don’t
count on too many Republican party loyalists or lapdog
journalist asking these questions.
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