Mike Huckabee’s Craziest Comments
Playing-it-coy presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is taking heat for comparing failure to act on the federal debt to – what else? – letting the Nazis get away with the Holocaust. “Let there never be a time in this country when some father has to look over his daughter’s shoulder and see her ask the haunting question, ‘why didn’t somebody do something?'” he told a crowd of NRA members last weekend. (Steve Kornacki at Salon points out that Huckabee has used the exact same anology before, in relation to abortion.)
It’s an open question whether Huckabee is crazy like a fox or crazy like a … lunatic. What’s not in dispute is that he’s some kind of crazy. If you have any doubts on that score, consider these collected Huck-isms.
Obama’s worldview was shaped by a world filled with madrassas: “I do think he has a different worldview and I think it’s in part molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas.”
Hillary skipped the 2010 campaign trail to have an “alibi” when she challenged Obama in 2012: “She saw this train wreck coming and took off for Cambodia.”
Obama never uses the word “terrorism”: “[W]ith a liberal President – you’re going to get universal healthcare, you’re going to get higher taxes, you’re going to get weak foreign policy, you’re going to get a flat refusal to acknowledge the use of the term ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorism.‘”
Homsexuality is like pedophilia, bestiality: “Well, I don’t think that’s a radical view to say we’re going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal.”
Obama grew up in Kenya: “[I]f you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”
The U.S. financial crisis was caused by economic terrorists: “There may, in fact, be evidence of economic terrorism that is fueling a lot of what’s going on. Now it’s a fascinating idea, that if somebody could break down the world economy, it would have a greater impact that any bomb ever set off. It seems to be there is plausible argument for it.”
We need a U.S.-Mexico border fence to keep out … Pakistanis: “The fact is that the immigration issue is not so much about people coming to pick lettuce or make beds, it’s about someone coming with a shoulder-fired missile.”
Mormons believe that “Jesus and the devil are brothers“
Or so he asked, wonderingly, at a 2007 debate with Republican presidential contenders, including (noted Mormon) Mitt Romney.
Related: In this 2007 Rolling Stone profile, Matt Taibbi concluded after much sober consideration that Huckabee, for all his personal warmth and charm, is “full-blown nuts, a Christian goofball of the highest order.”