Mike Huckabee and the rapist
Is it possible that former Arkansas Gov. and Baptist minister Mike Huckabee, a strong contender for the Republican nomination for President in 2008, was so caught up in the rightwing hatred of President Bill Clinton in 1996 that he engineered the release from prison of a convicted rapist? Who had raped a teenage girl who happened to be the second cousin of Bill Clinton? Because he believed against all evidence, including letters from other victims of rapist Wayne Dumond, that Clinton had railroaded an innocent man?
That's the story that's beginning to emerge, led by the reporting of Murray Waas in the Huffington Post. But it gets much worse. Within weeks of his release in 1999, Dumond sexually assaulted and murdered a 39-year-old woman in Kansas City, and possibly raped and murdered a second woman before he was arrested (he died in prison of natural causes before trial). Huckabee is refusing to release his papers as Governor that relate to the pardon.
Younger readers and those in the now 46 countries outside America who occasionally provide a reader of this blog may be forgiven if they don't remember or understand the intense rightwing hatred of Bill and Hillary Clinton that dogged them from the day they returned to Arkansas to enter political life.
Huckabee became governor of Arkansas in 1996 when "Clinton Derangement Syndrome" was at fever pitch and President Clinton was facing wild accusations from the right of having orchestrated various murders.
Huckabee, who had been lieutenant governor, moved to the statehouse after the resignation of Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, Clinton's successor. He needed wingnut support if he was going to win a full term in 1998, and the wingnuts, especially in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, had proclaimed Wayne Dumond to be yet another victim of the vengeful, murderin' Clintons. Here's another Huffington Post story on the influence of the anti-Clinton zealots in the case.
One might argue that Huckabee was simply a coldly calculating politician back then, just as today he refuses to admonish supporters who call Mormonism a "cult."
But I think he really believed the rightwing garbage about Clinton railroading Wayne Dumond. After all, Huckabee knew what had happened to Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in the Willie Horton affair. Horton, a convicted murderer, committed robbery and rape after he was let out for the weekend on a controversial weekend furlough program that Dukakis had not started but had supported. Republicans hammered away at it in the 1988 Presidential election and it was one of the factors that cost Dukakis the election.
Just as the Wayne Dumond affair may ultimately sink the Presidential hopes of Mike Huckabee unless he comes clean on what he did and why he did it.