WASHINGTON -- Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee criticized the Bush administration's war against terrorism Friday, delivering a bold and potentially risky speech that could establish the former Arkansas governor as the maverick among top Republican candidates and test his party's loyalty to President Bush. "This administration's bunker mentality has been counterproductive both at home and abroad," Huckabee said in opening a broad indictment of Bush's style and policy. The speech came after several top GOP candidates started distancing themselves from Bush, vowing change on such issues as illegal immigration and federal spending even as they endorsed Bush's foreign policy. By going much further than his rivals have in attacking Bush, Huckabee could draw attention to a campaign that's inched up in polls in recent months but still lacks the money and organization to compete head-on with better-known, better-financed candidates such as Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson. In first-to-vote Iowa, for example, an average of four recent polls put Huckabee fourth among Republican candidates with 10.3 percent, ahead of John McCain and within five points of Giuliani and Thompson, but far behind front-runner Romney, according to RealClearPolitics.com. His strong stand also could give him the kind of maverick image that McCain pursued in 2000, which appeals to independent voters in states such as New Hampshire, where they can vote in the Republican primary. But it also could turn off the majority of Republicans who still like Bush. "He's trying to carve out a responsible alternative to the administration's foreign policy," said Dennis Goldford, a political scientist at Drake University in Iowa. "But I don't know that it will do him any good in the Republican Party. While there is a lot of grumbling in the Republican Party about Bush, they're still pretty loyal." Huckabee endorsed Bush's surge of troops into Iraq, urging more time for it to work and criticizing Democratic proposals to get troops out as an invitation to chaos. But beyond that, he differed with Bush across the map. He accused the administration of shunning allies and turning world sentiment against the United States. "They've done a poor job of communicating and consulting countries, much as they have, frankly, the American people," Huckabee told about 150 people at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a center-right think tank in Washington. On Iran, he said Bush blew a chance to improve relations right after the 2001 terrorist attacks and that the United States should be talking to Iran today. "When we first invaded Afghanistan, Iran helped, especially in dealings with their ally, the Northern Alliance," he said. "They wanted to join us in fighting al-Qaida. ... The CIA and State Department supported a partnership. Some in the White House and beyond did not. And when President Bush included Iran in the axis of evil, everything went downhill pretty fast." Link
Dayton and his ilk pray into the direction of DC five times a day. The only thing you don't hear so often any more is that Bush should go up on Mt. Rushmore
and the world loved us before 9/11? Also we seem to be working pretty well with the Brits and the new French president so it's not like we're going alone. Translation: We're not letting the countries who disagree with us dictate everything we do. Forgetting that Iran is the mother of all terrorist states Huckabee? Just like that crazy 'Everything was swell with Kim Jong Mentally-Il until the heinous warmonger Bush dared to call them a part of the axis of evil' line the leftists love to use.
No, the world loved you after 9/11. Before and after 9/11, they didn't like you, but wanted to keep you in power. Now they're watching and waiting for you to fall, afraid of what will come next, but similarly afraid of what you will become next.
