Republican residential candidate former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee argued “CNBC utterly embarrassed themselves” in their handling of the GOP presidential debate and the US should attack ISIS’ supply lines on Saturday’s “Fox & Friends” on the Fox News Channel.
Huckabee said that during the CNBC debate, “I was thinking how frustrating it was to be told that we were going to be talking about the economy, about monetary policy, all economic issues. And we thought that was going to be the case because it’s CNBC, that’s their wheelhouse. We also were told there [were] going be algorithms that would be very carefully monitored to make sure that every candidate had an equal amount of time, and it would be balanced. Well, those two things both didn’t happen, and it was a complete disaster, and I think CNBC utterly embarrassed themselves in the manner which they conducted that debate. They went after us in a way that they never go after Democrats, and I do believe this, it united Republican candidates on that stage. So, maybe there was a benefit to it after all.”
Huckabee added that the RNC “absolutely” did the right thing by cancelling its debate with NBC.
Regarding healthcare, Huckabee said, “the next president, and I hope that’s me, should do the same thing John Jennedy did in declaring that we’re going to go to the moon and come back in decade. We need to say that within a decade, we’re going to find a cure to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s, the four big cost drivers.”
When asked who should run Syria, Huckabee answered, “I’m not sure that we have anybody that’s really capable of doing a decent job. Assad is a dictator, but I’ll be honest with you, under Assad things were much more stable, and there was much less volatility, not just in Syria, but in all the Middle East. And I don’t know that we have anybody to go in there and replace him right now. I thought Roger Simon had the best tweet. He said President Obama commits ground forces to Syria, but who are they going to fight with? I mean, it just shows a complete lack of clarity. We don’t know. We spent $500 million to train some rebels, and we ended up training four people for $500 million. This policy from this president — because he doesn’t know who our enemies really are.”
When asked how he would handle Syria and ISIS as president, Huckabee responded, “Well, what you have to do is realize it’s not just ISIS. There’s a bigger threat. It’s all of radical Islam. That includes Iran, but it also includes Boko Haram, it includes all these forces that still believe we ought to be pushed back to the seventh century. We need to see them all as enemies. We need to see them all as threats. And we need to take on the ones that are threatening us most, which right now may be ISIS. But we haven’t had a concentrated effort to bust their supply lines with A-10 Warthog fighters that would go over, or those planes that could bust their supply capacity, and until we start doing that aggressively, we’re not going to win this battle.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett