The new frontrunner in Iowa is starting to attract some scrutiny across the media. This article from the Los Angeles Times offers a good compendium of the more damaging charges. Obviously there is the insufficient fealty to tax cuts and inappropriate concern for sick kids and poor people in Arkansas (I mean, can you imagine?). Huckabee has signed the Grover Norquist “no new taxes” pledge, so maybe that’s not a problem for him anymore.
The Times managed to cover the Wayne Dumont angle without actually explaining the whole story:
Shortly after he became governor, Huckabee expressed his support for the release of a convicted rapist — who, once freed, sexually assaulted another woman and killed her. Wayne Dumond had been sentenced to life plus 20 years in 1984 for raping a 17-year-old cheerleader. Tucker, Huckabee’s predecessor, reduced Dumond’s sentence in 1992, making him eligible for parole.
In 1996, according to the Democrat-Gazette, Huckabee questioned Dumond’s guilt and said he might commute his sentence to time served. He also met with the parole board in a closed session. Some board members have said Huckabee pressured them into releasing Dumond; others said he did not.
Dumond was released from prison in October 1999. He chose his next victim 11 months later.
What isn’t expressed is that Dumond’s first victim was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton, and it became a wingnut cause celebre to release him.
But the real revelations in the article concern Huckabee’s venality – his belief in being entitled to gifts and perks common for a Southern preacher but not a politician.
During his years in office, the media scrutinized numerous mini-scandals, including an allegation that he used public funds for private purposes, and failed to properly report gifts and income. Huckabee was cited five times for violating ethics rules by the Arkansas Ethics Commission.
Toward the beginning of Huckabee’s governorship, the Arkansas Times, an alternative weekly, reported that his family had used a fund meant for upkeep of the governor’s mansion for expenses like out-of-town trips and dry-cleaning.
As he was preparing to leave office, local media reported that bridal registries had been established at two stores for the governor and his wife, even though they had been married for more than 30 years. State ethics laws prohibited Huckabee from receiving gifts of more than $100 as a reward for doing his job. But there was an exception for wedding presents. The Huckabees had registered for nearly $7,000 in housewares as they prepared to move to a private residence.
Arkansas Times Executive Editor Max Brantley — a longtime nemesis of Huckabee’s — said Huckabee’s ethics violations and other gaffes probably stemmed from his preacher’s background, in which “love offerings,” or gifts to the pastor, were encouraged.
That’s practically Giuliani-esque. Good thing there’s no Judith Nathan in his life, or he would have bankrupted the Arkansas budget!
Perhaps more damaging in a general election are the quotes that show how Huckabee’s religious life informs his political life. His clever dodge of a question in the YouTube debate about the death penalty, claiming that “Jesus was too smart to run for public office,” belies the fact that he answered the question in the context of Jesus before:
“Interestingly enough,” Huckabee allowed, “if there was ever an occasion for someone to have argued against the death penalty, I think Jesus could have done so on the cross and said, ‘This is an unjust punishment and I deserve clemency’.”
State-sponsored killing: OK with Jesus, OK with me.
And that’s how it’s gone on a number of issues, as Matt Taibbi recounted in a must-read for Rolling Stone.
But Huckabee is also something else: full-blown nuts, a Christian goofball of the highest order. He believes the Earth may be only 6,000 years old, angrily rejects the evidence that human beings evolved from “primates” and thinks America wouldn’t need so much Mexican labor if we allowed every aborted fetus to grow up and enter the workforce [...]
The troubling thing about Huckabee’s God rhetoric is that a man who is glad that Christians will “win” at Armageddon must be happy about the rest of us losing. When I press him on whether he believes all non-Christians are eternally damned, Huckabee is evasive. “Being president isn’t about picking who goes to heaven and who goes to hell,” he says. When none other than Bill O’Reilly hammered him on the same point a day later, Huckabee conceded that “I believe Jesus is the way to heaven.”
This God stuff isn’t just talk with Huck. One of his first acts as governor was to block Medicaid from funding an abortion for a mentally retarded teen ager who had been raped by her stepfather — an act in direct violation of federal law, which requires states to pay for abortions in cases of rape. “The state didn’t fund a single such abortion while Huckabee was governor,” says Dr. William Harrison of the Fayetteville Women’s Clinic. “Zero.”
As president, Huck would support a constitutional amendment banning abortion and would give science a back seat to religion. “Science changes with every generation and with new discoveries, and God doesn’t,” he says. “So I’ll stick with God if the two are in conflict.” Huckabee’s well-documented disdain for science was reflected in the performance of the Arkansas school system when he was governor; one independent survey gave the state an F for its science standards in schools, a grade that among other things reflected Huckabee’s hostility toward the teaching of evolution.
Obviously, some of this scrutiny will help Huckabee among hard-core conservatives, and some of it will hurt him. But at least there’s a little catch-up being done on the true nature of this guy.
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Left by The Right’s Field » The Ultimate Takedown of Huckabee: He Has a Human Heart, Dammit
December 4, 2007 at 1:50pm