Mike Huckabee was part of a particularly awful "This Week" panel Sunday morning, and when asked about Mitt Romney's remark that our economic problems in this country are all because we have too many "government workers," he doubled down.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Hold on one second. I'll ask the governor about this. What is wrong with jobs for teachers, firemen and police officers?
HUCKABEE: I can tell you. There's nothing wrong with it. My dad was a fireman. I love firemen jobs. But here's what you need. You need enough firemen to put out the fires. You don't arbitrarily go, hire firemen, policemen or teachers unless you have more kids in school. And what we need to be talking about is not hiring more teachers, but hiring better teachers and getting rid of the ones that don't teach. When 50 percent of the kids in Chicago, where Obama's campaign headquarters are located aren't even graduating, we need to be talking about improving graduation, not just increasing the number of public employees who in Chicago get $100,000 a year in salary and benefits.
JONES: Look, look, first of all, maybe I was raised wrong. I never heard of this threat to America called public employees. In my neighborhood, we called them teachers, we called them firefighters, we called them cops, we called them nurses, and we were taught to look up to them and to respect them. And for them now to be a punching bag, people like my father and my mother, who were public school teachers, who did not make $100,000 a year or whatever you just said and nothing near it, for them to become a punching bag is wrong.
Furthermore, I think we need to take a big step back here. When you have the amount of pain that's happening in the country, the Republican Party has not only been missing in action, they won't pass their own bills to help Americans right now. They won't pass their own ideas to help small businesses right now. Why? Because their gain will come when America has more pain. It's like having a life guard trying to help you--
STEPHANOPOULOS: You say they're rooting for failure?
JONES: I say they're rooting for failure. It's like having a life guard, Obama is a life guard trying to help people drowning. These guys are sitting back on the rocks hoping more people drown. That's wrong. It's morally wrong.
Very good job by Van Jones. But he also should've pointed out that over the past 4 years, we've lost hundreds of thousands of teachers, firefighters and cops. So Huckabee is just dead wrong -- there's absolutely nothing "arbitrary" about saying we need to hire more.
