Mike Huckabee Blamed For Surge in "Artful Dodgers"

Charleston, South Carolina, August 9, 2016 -- The recent nationwide explosion in pre-teen pickpockets has been traced to the first-term policies of president Mike Huckabee, according to a new study.

The analysis, conducted by the respected Institute for Alarming Developments in Charleston, South Carolina, found a “confluence of poorly conceived notions, badly executed” responsible for the current pickpocketing plague on the citizens of the United States.

“It's a nearly perfect storm of bad policy,” Randall Leeford, a political scientist with the IAD who supervised the study, said. “The blame for this nightmare falls squarely at the blunt feet of president Huckabee and an indifferent congress. It'll take a lot more than a little bit of luck to get us out of this mess.”

According to Mr. Leeford, multiple, mutually reinforcing factors have combined to create the current petty crime epidemic, in which citizens in cities from London, Ohio to Manchester, California can no longer walk the streets without having their monocles, watch fobs, signet rings and spare ha'pennies relieved of them by roving bands of tattered, light-fingered urchins.

“We think the trend began with the repeal of Roe v Wade in mid-2009,” Art Brownlow, a co-author of the study, explained. “The number of unwanted children in the country skyrocketed, of course, together with the number of deaths of women due to botched illegal abortions.”

“Huckabee's privatization of the federal prison system also led to vastly decreased oversight and management of the now profit-driven institutions, with a huge decline in security for both male and female prisoners. Naturally, a lot of female convicts, many of them lifers, wound up getting pregnant, often at the hands of private prison guards and almost always without consent. Thanks to Huckabee's Roe v Wade repeal, they had no choice but to have these children, but of course could not keep them.”

The dismantling of the federal, payroll, Medicare, corporate and Social Security tax systems, Mr. Brownlow explained, led both to a grossly underfunded federal government and the near-total collapse of charitable giving.

“The revenue generated by Huckabee's 30% sales tax is just about enough to maintain the massive federal church system and our continuing military presence in Iraq,” Mr. Brownlow said. “That doesn't leave much for any kind of federal program to take care of abandoned children. And, of course, with the repeal of federal income tax, charitable giving has evaporated. With nothing to deduct from, how many suckers are going to continue paying in what were once tax-deductible contributions? The numbers speak for themselves. State-run orphanages were overrun almost immediately, and nearly all private institutions have shut down due to a lack of funds.”

The Mike Huckabee “No Baby Don't Got 2 Mommies Nor 2 Daddies Neither” law, which outlawed adoption for same-sex couples, also reduced the number of loving families that could potentially care for the skyrocketing numbers of unwanted children.

“Combined, president Huckabee's policies have led to a situation whereby America now has a population of almost two million homeless, unaffiliated, uninsured children under the age of seven,” Mr. Leeford said. “These kids have to get food somehow. Most of them, it seems, have formed into small bands of petty criminals who make their livings preying on harried shoppers and businesspeople on the streets of our cities. A lot of them live in milk crates.”

Ed Bumble, the head of president Huckabee's Office of Applied Christian Beliefs, a cabinet position, said, “I really don't see the problem here. God clearly wants to punish these filthy kids for something, and it would be the height of human arrogance to ask what that something might be.”

“Besides,” Pastor Bumble continued, “a lot of them are going to die off on their own through disease, malnutrition and violent crime. That's just natural selection.”

“Obviously, this is a simple law enforcement issue,” Attorney General Bill Fang said. “What we need are more brutal laws that will teach these larcenous preschoolers a serious lesson and thereby serve as a strong deterrent. Back in the 1830s, in England, there was a problem like this one. I think George Eliot wrote about it. What they did then was to string the kids up like rabbits in a Chinatown shop window. Make petty larceny a capital crime, ASAP. It worked then, it'll work now.”

Attorney General Fang warned, however, that “most of these kids are armed to the teeth,” thanks primarily to president Huckabee's strict constructionist interpretation of the Constitution which required the repeal of all gun controls, regardless of age. “So be on the lookout. And shoot to kill,”

“President Huckabee has always believed in the sanctity of life,” White House Press Secretary Tom Chitling said. “And president Huckabee is perfectly prepared to kill 50,000 unplanned mothers a year and two million dangerous kids to prove it.”

By Ion Zwitter, Avant News Editor