NO, THIS IS NOT THE NICE, NORMAL HUCKABEE TRYING TO SEEM NASTY FOR EFFECT

Mike Huckabee has said a lot of extreme things recently, in what seems like an attempt to change his nice-guy image, but this is really just the old Huckabee:

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee indicated Thursday that if elected, he wouldn’t rule out employing federal troops or the Federal Bureau of Investigation to stop abortion from taking place in the United States....

The comments came at two public speaking stops on a tour of Iowa.

In response to a question from the audience at the Pizza Ranch in Jefferson, Iowa, Huckabee said he would “invoke the 5th and 14th amendments for the protection of every human being.” ...

“Would that be a huge controversy?” the former Arkansas governor asked. “Yes.” ...

At his next stop, in Rockwell City, Huckabee answered follow-up questions from the correspondent, saying: “All American citizens should be protected.”

Asked by another reporter how he would stop abortion, and whether this would mean using the FBI or federal forces to accomplish this, Huckabee replied: “We’ll see if I get to be president.”

Let's not forget that in 1996, early in his tenure as governor of Arkansas, Huckabee defied federal law to block a Medicare payment for a teenage incest victim's abortion:

Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas today refused to authorize a Medicaid payment for an abortion for a 15-year-old girl whose stepfather has been charged with incest, despite a Federal judge's order that such payments were required by Federal law.

Through a spokesman, Mr. Huckabee said his first obligation was to obey the Arkansas State Constitution, rather than Federal law. The State Constitution includes an amendment banning the use of public money for abortion except when a mother's life is endangered; the Federal statute requires that Medicaid pay for abortions that are performed on poor women in cases of rape or incest or a threat to the mother's life.

The girl, by the way, was reported to be mentally retarded.

In 2007, when he was first running for president, Huckabee packed an offensive reference to the Holocaust and a bizarre reference to immigration into a a two-sentence comment on abortion:

Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce. It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.

That's the old Huckabee -- the one David Brooks described in 2007 as "the most normal person running for president" and "too neighborly to seem presidential." He's not suddenly becoming nastier -- even though people like Brooks never noticed, he always was this nasty.