Reminder: Ignorance Is A Plus For GOP Candidates; The Huck

In an interview with Time Saturday, Mike Huckabee said that he and his staff "learned an important lesson" from the embarrassment he suffered when he didn't know about the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran a day and a half after it was released. "We are being much more careful now," Huckabee said. "If there is some breaking news, I am being pulled out of events to be sure that I know what may be happening."

That's probably a good idea, and it would be an even better one if Huckabee and his staff actually put it to use.

Huckabee is scheduled to appear on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" Wednesday, despite the fact that TV writers -- who he says he supports "unequivocally" and "absolutely" -- remain on strike. There's no conflict there, Huckabee explained earlier today, because "there was a special arrangement made for the late-night shows, and the writers have made this agreement to let the late-night shows come back on, so I don't anticipate that it's crossing a picket line."

Not exactly.

While David Letterman's production company, WorldWide Pants, has reached a deal with the Writers Guild of America -- meaning writers are returning to work at "The Late Show" and the WorldWide Pants-produced "Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson" -- NBC hasn't struck any such deal, and the writers are still picketing "The Tonight Show." When a reporter explained the situation to Huckabee today, the candidate again said that his "understanding" was that "there's a sort of dispensation given to the late-night shows."

"Is that right?" he asked.

Told that it wasn't right, Huckabee reportedly said, "Hmm" and "Oh," then moved on to another question.

Link.

With just one day to go before the Iowa caucuses, the leading Republican candidates took their A games to the network morning shows today. Or something like that.

Here's Mike Huckabee, explaining, during a "Good Morning America" appearance, why he showed an ad attacking Mitt Romney at a press conference in which he announced that he was too high-minded to use the ad at all: "If I hadn't have done it, the same media that said, 'Oh, you showed it to us,' would have said, 'You don't have one. You didn't show it to us.'"

Yes, but Huckabee must have known that once he showed the ad at his press conference, it would get some airtime on the cable news, right?

Apparently not.

"I don't know how it got out there," Huckabee protested. "And even the only network that said they had a copy said they didn't get it from us. They may have gotten it from one of the television stations who had it in their traffic."

Not to be outdone, Romney took a spin this morning on "Fox & Friends," where he was asked about a new John McCain ad that notes his lack of foreign policy experience. "Well, I'm not sure what the ad says," Romney said. "But, you know, if you just want to get somebody who knows a lot about foreign policy, well, go to the State Department and pluck somebody out."

Link.

And the quote of the day:

The Quad-City Times, coming to us via Think Progress, offers a clue. When the paper asked Huckabee Monday about his earlier lack of knowledge about the NIE, he made a joke about George W. Bush's lack of knowledge about intelligence, then said that the reporter who asked him about the report back in December was guilty of launching "an ambush question," then repeated his mischaracterization of the NIE-to-question timeline, then said this:

"The point I'm trying to make is that, on the campaign trail, nobody's going to be able, if they've been campaigning as hard as we have been, to keep up with every single thing, from what happened to Britney last night to who won 'Dancing With the Stars.'"

Link.