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Mike Huckabee Blasts de Blasio's 'Stunning' Ignorance About Refusing National Guard for NYC

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Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee had some words on Wednesday that every government official dealing with the current unrest needs to hear.

And that starts with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio – a Democrat who’s watching his city being destroyed by looting but somehow thinks having the National Guard present would make things worse.

Huckabee, a conservative Republican who served more than two full terms as governor of the Razorback State, knows enough about the uses of the National Guard to blast de Blasio’s “stunning” ignorance on the topic.

The choice of deploying the Guard, Huckabee said on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends,” lies with the governor of a state, not with any mayor — even the mayor of the nation’s largest city.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo “can decide he wants to put the National Guard in New York City, and there’s not a whole lot the mayor can do about it, other than just complain,” Huckabee said.

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Then Huckabee got to the heart of the issue: The abdication of responsibility by politicians like de Blasio when it comes to keeping their people safe is simply unacceptable.

“At some point,” he said, “there’s gonna have to be a real understanding that the purpose for which people are elected is to keep order, to make sure that there’s some stability within the social contract of people.

“The one thing government has to do, above everything else, is not give jobs, it’s not even balance the economy. It’s making it so that the ordinary people, walking up and down the sidewalk, can do so, and do it with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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“We have no other major function to even have a government other than that.”

“Fox & Friends” then played a clip of a de Blasio speech Tuesday declaring the National Guard was neither needed nor welcome in the Big Apple.

If “you bring outside armed forces into the equation that they are not trained for, people could be very unnerved by the dynamics that our police officers have learned to work with and deal with,” de Blasio said. “That’s a dangerous scenario.”

Co-host Ainsley Earnhardt noted that Minneapolis — where a man’s death in police custody sparked the national upheaval — had appeared to see order generally restored since the arrival of the National Guard. Why, she asked, wouldn’t other mayors want to follow that example?

“It makes no sense to me,” Huckabee said. “And by the way, de Blasio is totally off his rocker when he says the National Guard is not trained for that. Yes, they are. That’s exactly what they’re trained for … and they know how to get into these situations and handle them.

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“His ignorance of that is stunning to me.”

It’s safe to say de Blasio hasn’t impressed many sane Americans with his performance over the years.

His inept handling of mob violence targeted at police goes back years, as a New York Daily News report from 2017 makes clear. His ludicrous presidential run was a national joke. His antagonism toward religious groups over coronavirus restrictions infuriated conservatives.

And now his obvious impotence in the face of violent protests has shown him to be a man more interested in pushing a leftist agenda than in making sure his population is protected.

But Huckabee — who is a Baptist minister as well as a former politician and current political commentator — had a broader point to make, too.

The biggest problem the country is facing at the moment is “not a political divide, it’s a spiritual divide,” he said.

The callousness of the Minneapolis police officers involved in the death of George Floyd, as well as the rapacious greed and violence of the looters who have used the opportunity to declare war on the concept of property ownership, is a “sin problem,” Huckabee said.

And the solution is greater personal responsibility.

“This country could fall apart if people don’t self govern,” he said. “The ultimate governance of the United States is not the federal, state or the local. It’s self-governing. It’s when people believe that doing the right thing is the right thing.”

He then quoted Scripture: “Love thy neighbor as thyself. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

“And somewhere along the way, we have lost that mantra,” Huckabee said. “It hasn’t been taught. And when you see people out there throwing bricks, trying to injure and hurt cops. When you see people stealing and looting Louis Vuitton bags and they pretend that it’s all about police brutality, it isn’t.

“It’s about their selfish behavior, and somewhere we’ve got to address that issue more than simply say, ‘We have to look at police techniques.’”

It’s a solid bet those words, or anything like them, will bever be heard coming out of the mouth of a Bill de Blasio or any other mob-appeasing liberal politician.

But they’re exactly the kinds of words the whole country needs to hear.

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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn't need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
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