Huckabee: Glenn Beck creates boogeymen only he can see

Mike Huckabee lashed out at fellow Fox News host Glenn Beck after Beck called him a "progressive" for supporting Michelle Obama's anti-obesity initiative.

"This week Glenn Beck has taken to his radio show to attack me as a Progressive, which he has said is the same as a cancer and a Nazi," Huckabee wrote on his HuckPAC website. "What did I do that apparently caused him to link me to a fatal disease and a form of government that murdered millions of innocent Jews? I had the audacity — not of hope — but the audacity to give respect to the efforts of first lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign to address childhood obesity."

On his radio show Tuesday, Beck described Huckabee as "the perfect progressive candidate for the Republican Party" and said the former governor "doesn't want to disrupt giant government."

Huckabee responded that while he did not support the current policies of President Barack Obama, he did appreciate the first lady's efforts to reduce childhood obesity, adding that Beck had distorted the initiative "either out of ignorance or out of a deliberate attempt to distort them to create yet another 'boogey man' hiding in the closet that he and only he can see."

"The first lady’s approach is about personal responsibility — not the government literally taking candy from a baby’s mouth," he continued.

"[Beck] seems to fancy himself a prophet of sorts for his linking so many people and events together to describe a massive global conspiracy for pretty much everything. Sadly, he seems equally inept at recognizing the obvious fact that children are increasingly obese and that we now see clinical evidence of diseases in children that as recent as 20 years ago were found only in adults, such as Type 2 diabetes."

"Beck needs to stick to conspiracies that can’t be so easily debunked by facts," Huckabee said. "Why Beck has decided to aim his overloaded guns on me is beyond me. But he ought to clean his gun and point it more carefully lest it blow up in his face like it did this time."

Beck announced plans in early April to "transition off" his Fox News program in favor of a realigned agreement between Fox and his production company, Mercury Radio Arts.

He was perhaps best known for his far-reaching conspiracy theories about a secret communist plot to overthrow America by giving to charity and engaging in community politics. He usually claimed liberal and progressive groups were the primary orchestrator of communist (or socialist) schemes, and he often compared them to Nazis or other thugs, frequently citing these different and often competing ideologies fluidly, as if they were the same or similar.

With prior reporting by Stephen C. Webster.