Oh man. If the George W. Bush fans are looking for another (p)resident just like him, they need look no further than Mike Huckabee. You know when you’re watching Dubya and he starts trying to make some analogy and he starts rolling along into his story and suddenly the wheels come off? Common sense would dictate that he just stop speaking for a moment and recompose himself, but like so many other politicians, he just keeps talking. Remember when Dan Quayle talked about “Hitlerism” and what a dark time in this country’s history that was? Remember that blank stare in Bush’s eyes as he tried to remember how to say, “Fool me twice, shame on ME?” Well, here’s a quote from Faux News Sunday with Chris Wallace. Wallace, to his credit (or does he hate Huckabee as much as most right-wingers?), asked Huckabee about the the fact that ultimately, no WMDs were found in Iraq. Huckabee tries to make the case that just because they weren’t found didn’t mean they weren’t there. He then goes on to suggest that Jordan might have accepted them. You know, Jordan, one of our allies in the middle east. Then he starts the train wreck, trying to make some analogy to the NFL and what we normally simply call, “Monday Morning Quarterbacking.” Check it out, it’s a classic:
WALLACE: Governor, the Iraq survey group looked around Iraq for months after the invasion, could find no evidence that Saddam Hussein had an active program, a WMD program, when he was ousted, any active stockpile of weapons.Do you have any evidence for that contention?
HUCKABEE: Oh, I don’t have any evidence. But he was the one who announced openly that he did have weapons of mass destruction. He was also the one who had used similar weapons in the past.
I think let’s remember, too, that both Democrats and Republicans and our intelligence agencies believed that he had them.
My point was that, no, we didn’t find them. Did they get into Syria? Did they get into some remote area of Jordan? Did they go to some other place? We don’t know. They may not have existed.
But simply saying, “We didn’t find them, so therefore they didn’t exist,” is a bit of an overreach. And the bigger point is that at the time we went into the war — and that was really the question, should we have gone in.
If we had not have gone in and he had unleashed weapons of mass destruction, then everybody would be second-guessing the president and saying, “We should have taken action. The president was derelict in his duty.”
So it’s so easy. It’s like sitting down Monday morning at breakfast with your buddies and talking about why the quarterback of the NFL team didn’t get the winning play.
But you know what? If you’ve been on the NFL field and you’ve taken a couple of hits from 300-pound linemen, it’s a little, I guess, maybe different perspective in what you should have done.
So I think let’s give the president some credit for taking action that he thought would, in fact, help America. And Democrats agreed with him. And now it’s easy to second-guess, but I’m grateful that the president was willing to take what actions he thought would make America safer.
Sunday was apparently a rough day for John McCain as well. On “Meet The Press,” he was asked by Tim Russert whether or not he’d sign his own immigration bill if he was president. McCain took a long time to answer the question, but um, didn’t answer the question. Seems like it would be a pretty simple answer. I mean, McCain sponsored the bill, right? Yipes!
MR. RUSSERT: If the Senate passed your bill, S1433, the McCain-Kennedy Immigration Bill…SEN. McCAIN: Mm-hmm.
MR. RUSSERT: …would you as president sign it?
SEN. McCAIN: Yeah, but we–look, the lesson is it isn’t won. It isn’t going to come. It isn’t going to come. The lesson is they want the border secured first. That’s the lesson. I come from a border state. I know how to fix those borders with walls, with UAVs, with sensors, with cameras, with vehicle barriers. They want the border secured first. And I will do that, and, as president, I will have the border state governors secure–certify those borders are secured. And then we will have a temporary worker program with tamper-proof biometric documents, and any employer who employs someone in any other circumstances will be prosecuted. That means a lot of people will leave just, just normally because they’re not going to be able to get their job. Then, of course, we have to get rid of two million people who have committed crimes here. We have to round them up and deport them. As far as the others are concerned, we were in an ongoing debate and discussion when this whole thing collapsed, and part of that, I think, has to be a humane approach. Part of it has to be maybe people have to go back to the country that they came from for a period of time while we look at it. But the principle that the American people want, secure the borders, reward no one ahead of someone who has either waited or has come to this country legally because they have broken our laws to come here. But I’m confident–look, there’s, there’s humanitarian situations. There’s a soldier who’s missing in action in Iraq. His wife was here illegally. America’s not going to deport her. We have humanitarian circumstances. America’s a generous Judeo-Christian valued nation, and we can sit down together. The–all leading Republican candidates now just about agree that with–using those principles that I just articulated, we can fix it. But secure the borders first.
MR. RUSSERT: But you would sign your bill…
SEN. McCAIN: It’s not going to come across my desk.
MR. RUSSERT: It won’t pass.
SEN. McCAIN: I–if pigs fly, then–look…
MR. RUSSERT: So it’s dead.
SEN. McCAIN: The bill, the bill is dead as it is written. We know that. We know that. And the bill is going to have to be, and I would sign it, securing the borders first and articulating those principles that I did. That’s what we got out of this last very divisive and tough debate. And we have to get those borders secured. That’s what Americans want first.