Here I am, going on about Mike Huckabee again. Well, the Iowa caucuses are just over the Christmas horizon and this guy is almost as threatening to out national well-being as Barak Obama is or as Jimmy Carter was.
Would the party of Ronald Reagan actually nominate a man who, prior to announcing his candidacy for the nomination, appears never to have given a thought to foreign affairs at all? And this while our soldiers are in the field against a lethal enemy.
At this point he does not even have a foreign policy adviser. If he does, it is a well kept secret.
He recently published an essay in Foreign Affairs to clear up this rumor that he thinks the world is flat and that it does not extend beyond North America. (Is he aware of Canada? He has made mention of Mexico, and of course he wants to close Gitmo so the Europeans will like us, but can he find Europe on a map?) Matthew Continetti at the Weekly Standard provides links to various assessments of that essay. It's embarrassing.
One of those responses comes from Stephen Hayes ("The Perils of Huckaplomacy") who also provides quotes from the affable but inept former Arkansas governor in response to questions from CNN's Wolf Blitzer at a candidates' debate on June 5. He was asked directly about the al-Maliki government and about Darfur. His answers are frightening only because so many people are taking this guy seriously as a presidential candidate.
I think there's some real doubt about that, Wolf. But I want to remind all of us on this stage and the people in the audience that there's a reason that this is such a struggle. And I think we miss it over here in the West. Today's the birthday of Ronald Reagan. We all would believe that Ronald Reagan is the one who ended the Cold War, and Ronald Reagan is the one who helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union. But there's a group of people who don't believe that, and that's the Taliban. They believe they brought about the demise of the Soviet Union because of the way they fought in Afghanistan. And what I want to just mention is that it is not the size of the dog in the fight, it is the size of the fight in the dog.
What? Nothing there about the government in Iraq and what to do about it. And is he comparing himself to the Taliban in their fight as the mujaheddin against the Soviets?
On Darfur, he immediately redirected the conversation toward what appears to be a proposed War on Poverty:
I think we have some role to play in it, but I guess what disturbs me even more, we have not even addressed the genocide that's going on and the infanticide in our own country with the slaughter of millions of unborn children. And we also have extraordinary poverty in this country. Yes, we ought to be involved. But you know something? There are a lot of people in America that don't think the only poverty is in Darfur--understand, there's poverty in the Delta. There are people who don't have running water, people that don't have access to medical care and don't have a decent school to go to and you don't have to go halfway around the world to find it. We've got it right here in this country.
Was one Johnson era not enough? Huckabee's foreign policy seems to be: get elected, then hope the subject doesn't come up.
Kyle-Ann Shiver at American Thinker gives the best summary of how sensible people should view Mike Huckabee as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
We are up to our necks in a war for our own survival, and I will not put my vote in the hands of a man who learned his methods for foreign policy in vacation Bible school. We need a fierce, street-fighting Commander in Chief without a single gullible bone in his body.
John McCain is looking better all the time.
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