Huckabee Bumbles Three Times In One Sentence, Compounds His Cluelessness On The Iran NIE
December 6th, 2007On Tuesday night, when former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) was asked what he thought of the , he said that he had that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
Not much has changed apparently. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe this morning, Huckabee tried to dismiss criticism of his “” with a joke, but only managed to compound his cluelessness:
SHUSTER: But it gets to the idea that being governor of Arkansas is not necessarily best sort of foreign policy experience and that something that I think a lot of your critics are aiming at your direction. How do you respond to them?
HUCKABEE: Well, I don’t blame my staff. It is a situation where a report was released at 10:00 in the morning, the president hadn’t seen it in four years and I’m supposed to see it four hours later.
Huckabee then called it “a gotcha question” at a dinner full of reporters. Watch it:
In his attempt at a humor-driven dismissal, Huckabee revealed he still doesn’t know much about the NIE.
1) The NIE was released the previous day, not that morning. The NIE was released to the public in . The dinner where Huckabee was asked about the NIE took place .
2) Huckabee had more than “four hours.” According to the timeline above, Huckabee could have learned about the NIE anytime overnight or during the course of the next day if he had picked up a newspaper. Hotline notes, on the same day Huckabee said he hadn’t heard of it, the Iran NIE “not only dominated the Democrats’ debate here in town but also in response.”
3) Bush couldn’t have seen the report “four years” ago. The NIE was , thus Bush couldn’t have had “four years” to see the report. While the intelligence community did eventually learn that Iran shut down its nuclear program four years ago, that knowledge until this past summer.
So, in one sentence, a confused Huckabee managed to compound his cluelessness over the NIE and confirmed once again his “.”
Transcript:
