Hillary Clinton's interview on CNN was "painful" to sit through because the former secretary of state continually passed the buck and dodged responsibility for her actions, GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee tells
Newsmax TV.
"[I watched] as much as I could handle," Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, said Wednesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show."
"It was painful and the most painful thing is that even after all these years, she still blames everything that has happened on someone else."
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And most of the blame Clinton assigns falls squarely on the Republican Party, Huckabee believes.
"It's always the Republicans, it's always the vast right-wing conspiracy. It's never that she destroyed emails, it's never that she put things on the server that were illegal, it's never that she lied about Benghazi," Huckabee said.
"It's never that she's failed to answer the legitimate questions that have been posed to her, it's never that she's been a lady filled with activity but nothing to show for it.
"It's not that we have had these very curious relationships between big donors to the Clinton Foundation and the policies of her State Department. No, somehow all of that is the fault of Republicans."
But the blame game won't last forever, according to Huckabee, who said Clinton will eventually be forced to face the music.
"Sooner or later she's going to have to let the media out from under the ropes, she's going to have to answer some real questions. And if it's not sooner, I'll be happy to take her on, on the debate stage," he said.
"We don't need Hillary, which is nothing more than a third Obama term. And for those of us who haven't been too happy with the two that he has had, the last thing on God's earth that we would want is for Barack Obama's policies to get one more bite at the apple."
Huckabee — author of
"God, Guns, Grits and Gravy," published by St. Martin's Press — also took issue with President Barack Obama's assertion that the Islamic State (ISIS) will ultimately not be defeated by guns, but by "better ideas."
"This is why it's so urgent that we have a new president with a very different world view than this one, who has such a naiveté when it comes to understanding why Islamic jihadists want to kill us. They want to kill us because it is their religious conviction that we need to die and they need to set up a dominating caliphate," Huckabee said.
"We defeat savagery by having a stronger pushback and a stronger weapon than the savage kind of approaches that they have — to cut the heads off of Christian children, to burn people alive in cages, to drown them while bound.
"These aren't civilized people and to say that we can sit down and have an exchange of ideas. This isn't a college fraternity. This is war against a bunch of crazy people who want to kill us and the only way we're going to stop them is that we have to obliterate them."
He said that in order to defeat ISIS the nation must rebuild the military to a "respectable level."
"It's the lowest it's been since pre-World War II. Which is … the worst possible direction. We're signaling to our enemies that we're not serious about taking them on. I want to have a military that's spending somewhat around six percent of the GDP, not two percent," Huckabee told Steve Malzberg.
"I want to have one that is so incredibly strong that it's not likely we'll ever have to use them because everyone in the world will understand one thing: you mess with America or you mess with an American, and you're going to be on your backside real quickly with the greatest show of force the world has ever known.
"That's how we defeat not just radical Islam, it's how we defeat any enemy, any terrorist organization, any state government that somehow believes America's going to be a pushover. Bullies only beat up the people they think they can whip. Bullies never take on the people they know will put them on their tail. We need to let the world know, you touch America, we'll put you on your tail."
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