Mike Huckabee Creates International Crisis By Sticking Godly Foot In Pious Mouth

Picture a bearded white Urkel saying 'Did I do that?'

God, we loathe Mike Huckabee, with his stupid hipster beard and his stupid smug face and his thoroughly primitive belief that a book patched together from the oral traditions of a bunch of illiterate shepherds trapped in a desert is the literal Word of God, so shut up and love Jesus before the seals are broken and the Four Horsemen come galloping across the sky and the true believers — such as, not coincidentally, Mike Huckabee — start ascending to heaven like the world’s chattiest helium balloons.

Or something to that effect, we don’t know, we pretty much stop listening to this eschatology when it gets to the part where the whole mishegas requires our people to either convert to Christianity or get slaughtered by whoever turns out to be the antichrist. (Donald Trump, it is Donald Trump, we never thought God would invest such power in a doddering senile idiot, so that’s our bad for not seeing it coming.)

Unfortunately for both us and humanity, Huckabee is America’s ambassador to Israel, which is supposed to be eschaton Ground Zero on some unknowable future date. Since the Middle East is one of the most fought-over areas in the world, one would hope for an ambassador who chooses his words carefully, who does not speak with great hyperbole. One who does not off-handedly dismiss the inconvenient existence of every Arab in the region with the glib comment that Israel can take all that dang land if they want it.

From Politico, which is coming up on two decades of WINNING THE MORNING:

Huckabee spoke in an interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that aired Friday. Carlson said that according to the Bible, the descendants of Abraham would receive land that today would include much of the Middle East, including parts of modern-day Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. He quoted from Genesis Chapter 15 and asked Huckabee if Israel had a right to that land.

Huckabee responded “It would be fine if they took it all.”

What? No, no, it would not in any way be “fine” if Israel took over everything “from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates,” which is the area the Book of Genesis talks about. We do not care what the Bible says, as the Bible was written thousands of years ago, when perhaps even God Himself could not foresee just how insanely fucking stupid humanity was going to get.

Huckabee tried almost immediately to walk back his statement, telling Carlson that he was being hyperbolic. Furthermore, he went on, the question is irrelevant because Israel does not want to take over all that land. Nor is it even trying, though we figure that attitude might last only until Jared Kushner sees yet another area besides the Gaza Strip that he thinks he can turn into the Middle East version of the Riviera.

Needless to say, the Arab nations that would cease to exist if somehow Israel had the will and the manpower to take over the entire Levant were not pleased. Over a dozen of them put out a statement excoriating Huckabee:

“These statements directly contradict the vision put forward by U.S. President Donald J. Trump … based on containing escalation and creating a political horizon for a comprehensive settlement that ensures the Palestinian people have their own independent state,” the statement said.

The US Embassy in Jerusalem also put out a statement saying Huckabee’s words were being taken out of context, and there has not been a sudden change in US policy that our dopey ambassador accidentally revealed on Tucker Carlson’s YouTube channel.

The whole interview is here. Huckabee’s comments start at 1:01:55. We recommend starting a few minutes before that if you want to hear the context:

Have you ever seen two of the smuggest morons to ever ooze out of America’s gene pool like the Creature from the Black Lagoon try to puzzle out the ways in which a 21st-century geopolitical nightmare intersects a somewhat thorny religious and geographic question arising from a book that tried to compile folktales passed along orally for centuries in what amounts to the world’s dumbest game of Telephone? Well, now you have.

We should note that it is not as if Tucker Carlson is playing it straight here, despite his confused facial expression that he thinks makes him look like a man thirsty for knowledge and serious inquiries of the mind, and not like a puppy trying to figure out how to work a doorknob. He’s a nationalist and a bigot who wants America to kick out dark-skinned immigrants, retreat from the world and become Fortress Whiteness. And he’ll take any reason he can get to push that position.

This is the drawback to naming a Christ-humping wingnut to one of the more delicate ambassadorial gigs in America. You get an incredibly indelicate Christ-humping wingnut whose belief in his eternal salvation is at odds with modern geopolitics and the reality that a huge majority of the eight billion people on this planet think he’s nuttier than a sack of nuts. The only way it could be worse is if the president actually cared.

[YouTube / Politico archive link]

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