Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee needled at fellow GOP presidential contender Ben Carson on MSNBC this morning, declaring, “I never hit my mother with a hammer and I never stabbed anybody.”
“Never wrote about it either. So there you go. At least I’m out there on the record for that,” he said.
Huckabee won’t be facing off with Carson on the main debate stage tomorrow night as his poll numbers bumped him to the undercard round.
“I’ve written 12 books. I assure you they’ve all been put under incredible scrutiny. And it’s not that it’s something you don’t expect. You know that if you run for office, you’re going to be put through the sausage grinder,” he said.
On Sunday, Carson told NBC that the intense scrutiny of what he wrote in his books arises from the “secular progressive movement in this country” worried that his campaign is attracting “a great diversity of people.”
“I have always said that I expect to be vetted, but being vetted and what is going on with me — ‘You said this 30 years ago, you said this 20 years ago, this didn’t exist’ — you know, I have not seen that with anyone else,” he said.
Huckabee said this morning that he wouldn’t “get into arguing what Ben did or didn’t do, but the one thing I heard him say that I was kind of taken aback when he said that people are looking into his personal life and they are going after them, I’m thinking, pal, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
“They have not yet come after your kids and the rest of your family; they will. This is part of the part of the process. This ain’t bean bag, as we say. It is a brutal process. I’ve been through it for 26 years and life ain’t fair. I’m telling you,” the governor said.
Front-runner Donald Trump told ABC on Sunday that the rage Carson describes in his youth may not be “cured.”
“I hope it all works out for him. It’s a strange situation, though, when you talk about hitting your mother in the head with a hammer and hitting your friend in the face with a lock, with a padlock, and when you talk about stabbing somebody, but the knife saved him, when, you know, the — the belt buckle saved him. I mean, it’s a weird deal going on,” Trump said.
“And I hope it all works out, because I don’t want to see Ben have problems over this stuff. And, you know, it’s a very strange situation. I guess a book was written — I don’t know where this all came from, but a book was written before he ran for politics. But he said he has pathological disease in the book. When you have pathological disease, that’s a very serious problem because that’s not something that’s cured. That’s something that you have to live with. And that’s a very serious thing to have to live with,” he continued.
Trump added, “I can say that I never tried to hit my mother in any way, shape or form.”
He said that Carson has been “just hanging around” on his coattails in the No. 2 spot, “and I hope this works out for him, frankly.”
“I hope that there is not going to be a problem on this. But it’s a lot of statements are very troubling statements, I mean — and for him, too. He understands that.”
Carson told Fox Business Network this morning of people who are questioning his stories of violence in his youth: “I guess that is a great compliment to me if they don’t think I was ever capable of that.”
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