Huckabee And The NIE
HUCKABEE AND THE NIE....Last night I wrote an email to a friend about Mike Huckabee and Wayne Dumond:
What's actually a little weird is that this is going to get a lot attention, whereas the fact that he hadn't even heard of the Iran NIE by Tuesday night won't....But honestly, the NIE thing is genuinely disqualifying for a presidential candidate. It wasn't a gotcha question. Huckabee just hadn't heard about it and didn't care.But maybe I'm too cynical! Maybe the press will pick up on this. For starters, here's Huckabee feebly lying about the whole thing on today's Morning Joe:
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.No. The NIE was released Monday morning. He was asked about it Tuesday evening. That's two days. Two days in which the NIE was on the front page of every newspaper; it was blanketing cable TV, talk radio, and the blogosphere; and the president of the United States addressed its conclusions in a press conference. It was blockbuster news on one of the most important foreign policy issues of the campaign and Huckabee didn't even know about it.
If this were just an attempt to play gotcha with Huckabee, that would be one thing. But it wasn't. It was an ordinary question from a reporter who assumed — rightfully — that any serious candidate for president of the United States would keep up with news like this and have something to say about it. Huckabee didn't.