Mike Huckabee has come out swinging against Meryl Streep and her criticism of President-elect Donald Trump during a Golden Globes speech, accusing the Oscar-winning star of playing fast and loose with the facts and once helping "stir up a hysterical fear of cancer."
"As expected, last night's Golden Globe Awards gave Hollywood stars a chance to cry over the end of the Obama era and posture self-righteously about Donald Trump," the former Arkansas governor said Monday on his Facebook page.
"But the one who's getting the most press is Meryl Streep … Meryl Streep is a gifted actress, possibly the best of her generation, but let's get real: a guardian of the truth she is not."
Streep used her acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award to criticize Trump, without mentioning him by name, for allegedly making physical gestures that appeared to mock disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski.
The star of "Sophie's Choice," "The Devil Wears Prada" "Postcards from the Edge" and "Mamma Mia!" told the awards-show audience that while she had seen "many, many powerful performances" over the past year, there was one that "stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart."
"Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter," Streep said.
"Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can't get it out of my head, because it wasn't in a movie. It was real life.
"And this instinct to humiliate, when it's modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody's life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose. O.K., go on with it."
Huckabee responded that Streep "couldn't even get through her speech last night without repeating 'fake news.' … Trump was not mocking the reporter's disability but just using a gesture he uses all the time to indicate anyone who's flummoxed about something."
He said the acclaimed actress has notoriously waded into public policy in the past, with an attack the use of the chemical Alar on apples — "an overblown scare that bankrupted a lot of mom-and-pop apple farmers."
"She helped stir up a hysterical fear of cancer caused by Alar, even though, as the American Council on Science and Health reported, to get a dose of Alar equivalent to what was fed the mice in the study, a human would have to drink 19,000 quarts of apple juice every day for life. Cancer would be the least of your worries, since you'd drown in apple juice on day one," Huckabee said.
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