Republican presidential candidate and Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee criticized President Obama for “attacking Republicans” while the French president is “going after ISIS,” argued the “same people” who “gave us the Obamacare website” “want us to just trust them that all the people who come here are going to behave nicely,” and stated, “I don’t see people saying, ‘Let’s send them [Syrian refugees] to Martha’s Vineyard, let’s send them to Chappaqua, let’s send them to the upper west side of Manhattan'” on Wednesday’s “MSNBC Live.”
Huckabee said, in response to President Obama’s criticism of the GOP opponents of his Syrian refugee policy, “if the president honestly believes that ISIS is concerned about what we think about them, and that they are driven by that, then the president is more delusional than I ever imagined, when it comes to dealing with this crisis. Here we have a French president who’s going after ISIS, with bombs, with closed borders, and with an all-out attack, a left-wing politically correct, socialist, French president. And our president, he’s attacking Republicans, specifically Republican governors, because they know that the brunt of this refugee issue is going to be settled by their budgets, and by their neighborhoods. It’s just astonishing to see that the president would make this all about himself, not about the safety and security of the American people. The number one job the president has, protect America, not protect the reputation of Islam.”
When asked if he was saying the US should have admit zero refugees, Huckabee answered, “I don’t think it’s about a religious test. I’ve never suggested that. And, honestly, if there are children, and there are elderly women, and there are people who have been vetted, the issue is not so much how many or who. The issue is how do we know who these people are? And the fact is, we’re being asked to just trust the federal government, and we’re being told something that is nothing less than fairy dust when they tell us that they have this wonderful process in place. These are the same people who spent half a billion dollars supposedly training Syrian rebels, and ended up training four of them for that amount of money, that gave us the Obamacare website, the explanation that was a total lie for what happened in Benghazi. These are the people that said they would get to the bottom of the IRS attack on conservatives and pro-Israel groups. And now they want us to just trust them that all the people who come here are going to behave nicely, none of them are really ISIS plants, and that we don’t need to fear. We saw what happened in the streets of Paris. And I’ll tell you, the people who are pushing for us to take them in, interestingly they’re not pushing for them to come into their neighborhoods. I don’t see people saying, ‘Let’s send them to Martha’s Vineyard, let’s send them to Chappaqua, let’s send them to the upper west side of Manhattan.’ The people who are asking for this live behind gated communities and are generally guarded by armed guards. Well, a lot of Americans don’t have that luxury, and they are not comfortable when they see the carnage in Paris, wondering is that what’s coming to their neighborhood next.”
Huckabee was also asked what number of ground troops he would send to fight ISIS. He responded, “rather than the number, I think we base it on what we need to do to eliminate ISIS. We can’t do this in a half-hearted way.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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