Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is outraged by President Obama’s decision to restore the original name of the country’s highest peak, Denali, after years of campaigning by Alaskans including the state’s Republican senators.
Huckabee told Newsmax TV yesterday that he’d like to see Republicans in Congress block the move and joked that Obama might next want to change the name of the Washington Monument to the “Obama Monument.” The GOP presidential candidate continued his anti-Denali crusade in an interview with Iowa conservative radio host Jan Mickelson yesterday, saying that renaming the mountain is “outrageous” and shows that the president “doesn’t think that there are any limits” on his power.
Huckabee placed part of the blame on Republicans in Congress who, he said, have been indulging the president like a spoiled child. “It’s almost like the child,” he said, “that if you keep on letting him get cookies out of the cookie jar and nobody ever slaps his hand and says you can’t do it, he’s going to keep eating cookies. And this president is going to eat the last cookie in the jar all the way up to his last day in office.”
When Mickelson suggested that renaming national monuments could be a good “opportunity for fundraising” for a president, Huckabee joked, “If I’m president, I think we’ll name the Arkansas River the Huckabee River, why not?”
“This could be how he finances his presidential library,” he joked of Obama, “he sells naming rights to various national monuments all over the country and Mt. Rushmore becomes ‘Mt. Schwartz.’”
