Showing posts with label Huckabee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Huckabee. Show all posts

Monday, November 30, 2009

Michael Dukakis was a piker

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According to authorities, Maurice Clemmons killed four Seattle-area cops and Mike Huckabee's political career.

That this guy was running around the country because the former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate made him eligible for parole in 2000 is bad enough. That this is the second time people ended up dead because of Huckabee's lenient ways is immeasurably worse.

And someone in the national Republican Party needs to formally apologize to Michael Dukakis, whose Willie Horton moment was pure Amateur Night compared to Republican Huckabee's reign of error in Arkansas.


BECAUSE YOU can't make this stuff up, The Associated Press takes the story from here:
As governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee had a hand pardoning or commuting many more prisoners than his three immediate predecessors combined. Maurice Clemmons, the suspect in Sunday's slaying of four Seattle-area police officers, was among them.
For a politician considering another run for the White House, Clemmons could become Huckabee's Willie Horton.

"In a primary between a law-and-order Republican and him, I think it could definitely be a vulnerability," said Art English, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. "It is very damaging when you have someone like that whose sentence was commuted. That's pretty high profile and very devastating and very tragic."

English said it's hard to avoid comparing the case to Horton, a convicted killer who raped a woman and assaulted her fiance while on release as part of a prison furlough program supported by Michael Dukakis when he was governor of Massachusetts.

Allies of former President George H.W. Bush ran ads criticizing Dukakis for his support of the program, undermining the Democrat's presidential campaign.


(snip)

Huckabee's role in gaining the release of a convicted rapist, Wayne DuMond, was the subject of an attack ad during his presidential run. While Huckabee's predecessor, Tucker, reduced DuMond's sentence making him eligible for parole, Huckabee took steps almost immediately after taking office to win DuMond's release.

Two members of the state parole board said Huckabee pressured them to show DuMond mercy, while Huckabee publicly questioned whether DuMond was guilty of the rape of a teenage girl. During the presidential primaries, a conservative group aired television commercials in South Carolina featuring the mother of Carol Sue Shields, whom DuMond killed in 2000 after his release.

Pulaski County Prosecutor Larry Jegley, whose office opposed Clemmons' parole in 2000 and 2004, said Huckabee created a flaw in the Arkansas justice system by freeing the number of prisoners he did.
"(Clemmons) should have stayed locked up like the jury wanted him and we wouldn't even be having this discussion," Jegley said.

"I just have been figuratively holding my breath and hoping something like this wouldn't happen," Jegley said. "I just think that a lot of the people that were subjects of clemency during that period of time were some very dangerous people who didn't need to be let out."
IT USED TO BE that when someone screwed up badly enough, they'd publicly repent of their sins, put on sackcloth garments and cover themselves in ashes as a sign of penance.

It is no credit to our "advanced" society that messing up big time now -- at least for certain privileged castes -- is just a ticket to a big buyout . . .
or a cable-TV talk show.

Right, Huck?


SPLINTER. PLANK. EYE . . . Rev. Huckabee.

Friday, May 16, 2008

Thursday, January 03, 2008

It's not what they say, it's what they do

Huckabee is the one Republican candidate in the race who has talked often about working class and middle class Americans and the anxieties they have even in an economy that by the numbers looks pretty good. In an interview aboard the Huckabus, the candidate once again discussed the economic situation of "people at the lower ends of the economic scale," who because of rising energy, health care, and education prices "don't have the same level of disposable income they had this time a year ago."

The real story of the Huckabee campaign is that his candidacy contemplates a refashioning of the Republican party to address the concerns of middle and working class Americans. Thus, while it's true that many of these Americans are also religious conservatives--and true, too, that Huckabee leads among Iowa's religious conservatives by a very wide margin--it's a mistake to think that his campaign is narrowly pitched to that group of voters.

Huckabee has yet to fashion economic policies that might appeal to middle and working class voters--"Sam's Club Republicans," as they have been called, in contrast to the old "country club Republicans." But at some point his campaign presumably will have to offer policies to match his rhetoric.

What was striking about the rallies I saw was the extent to which Huckabee hopes to make common cause with people like himself--"who don't necessarily have the right pedigree .  .  . or the right last name .  .  . or all the resources"--in order to defeat his opponents. Thus, in Waterloo, he told the audience, "Nothing more gets to the heart of what we are than to say that no matter where you came from, or what your last name is, or what your parents were, or what they do for a living, you matter. You may not pick where you started from, but you have every opportunity to decide where you end up." That "you" is not an impersonal usage. As he told the audience, "I've lived the life many of you have lived."

-- Terry Eastland in the Weekly Standard,
profiling the Mike Huckabee campaign


The Late Show With David Letterman snagged Hillary Clinton as a last-minute guest for his New York City show tonight. But on the other coast, about 100 striking writers carrying signs saying "Mike Huckabee: What Would Jesus Do?" and "Huckabee: You Can't Deny This Cross" protested the Republican presidential candidate's decision to cross their union's picket line outside NBC Studios in Burbank even though he expressed
"unequivocal" and "absolute" support for the writers' cause earlier in the day. He was the main guest on Leno's first Tonight Show back from strike hiatus after Jay, too, decided to cross the picket line. The strikers have been crowding every entranceway all day, from 8 AM through 6 PM, to ensure they slammed the former Arkansas governor who of all the GOP candidates running for the White House has actively solicited and received union support. “We’re hoping that when he [Huckabee] arrives and sees the picket line he’ll turn around," said WGA West prez Patric Verrone. "We’ll be disappointed if he makes the appearance."

-- Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily


He made the appearance. So much for "a refashioning of the Republican party to address the concerns of middle and working class Americans," eh?

Scab.