Huckabee confusion

While grading tests last night, I had the Republican debate on and heard Chris Matthews' post-debate wrap-up show on in the background. And I heard Matthews ask Mike Huckabee about Saddam Hussein's WMD. Huckabee had said in the debate in one of his homey metaphors: Just because you can't find an Easter Egg doesn't mean that it isn't there. And Huckabee answered that they might have been sent to Jordan. Of course, no one has ever suggested that they were sent to Jordan, but to Syria. The Corner has the video.

Normally, I would have just dismissed that error has a tired candidate misspeaking after a tense debate. Some people in the blogosphere got all excited when John McCain said that he'd been in a Germany and that "President Putin of Germany" had given a Cold War-style speech. I gave McCain the benefit of the doubt that he knows that Putin is the President of Russia and that he just misspoke after having mentioned Germany in the previous sentence. But Matthews came back and asked Huckabee again about why King Abdullah would have gone along with hiding Hussein's WMD's and Huckabee repeated his mistake and went on to praise King Abdullah. He obviously had no clue that the suspicion is that the WMD were sent to Syria, not Jordan and that the guy he should have been talking about was Assad, not Abdullah.

It's one thing for Huckabee to have made a geographic goof and said that Afghanistan is on Pakistan's eastern border, but to confuse Syria and Jordan is a serious mistake and he didn't seem to have any idea that he had done so, even after Matthews gave him a chance to redeem his error.