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Thursday, December 03, 2009

Mike Huckabee's record on freeing violent criminals because Jesus told him to is worse than we knew
Posted by Jill | 6:30 AM
Gene Lyons:

During the former Baptist minister's decade as Arkansas governor, it appeared that no matter how heinous an inmate's crimes, all he had to do for a pardon was drop to his knees, praise Jesus and persuade some preacher known to Huckabee of his newfound holiness. "Everybody knows that Mike Huckabee makes up his mind what to do by what God tells him to do," said one minister who gained clemency for a prisoner serving 100 years for the strong-arm robbery of elderly neighbors.

Making the governor's personal acquaintance also seemed to help. Inmates competed to be assigned to do yard work at the Governor's Mansion. "If you do a good job raking the governor's leaves," Pulaski County (Little Rock) prosecutor Larry Jegley complained bitterly, "you can go free."

Altogether, Huckabee commuted 163 inmates' sentences, including a dozen murderers. Several have already ended up back in prison. Indeed, given Huckabee's track record, Maurice Clemmons probably won't be the last to earn notoriety. We must pray that he ends up being the worst. Only a strong public outcry in 2004 prevented the governor from freeing a Lonoke County killer who'd beaten, raped and run over a pregnant woman with his car, only to get religion in the penitentiary.


Look, there are those people who can only control their behavior when they have a religious framework within which to work. I don't understand needing a great white alpha male in the sky ready to smite you in order to behave because I don't need one, I can do it on my own. But hey -- whatever it takes. However, as I noted on Tuesday, deeds rather than faith ought to be the benchmark of whether someone has truly repented. And where Mike Huckabee is concerned, it's all about the professions of faith rather than tha actions of faith. But isn't this a logical outcome of a theology which states that nothing you do actually DO counts, it's all about whether you choose to believe a story? Isn't it only a matter of degree of heinousness that takes you on the road from being Mark Sanford to being Maurice Clemmons? Once you decide that it's about faith not deeds, isn't it one long continuum of amorality and criminality? And that's if you want to buy (as Huck did) that Clemmons' "conversion" was real, and not something being more a function of getting off on the old ultraviolence and tolchocking and getting to bed with one's wives' handmaidens, as Alex in A Clockwork Orange does.

How does one reconcile someone like Mike Huckabee, who's a rabid fetophile, wanting to free someone who beat, raped, and ran over a pregnant woman with his car? What about THAT fetus? Or does a man's conversion take priority over even a fetus?

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4 Comments:
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Jill, I am sorry, but why do you find it strange that a person who believes in magic can't have other totally irrational thoughts?

Huckabee was an abused child. He can identify with terrible people. He can not sympathize with other people. His pardons were never for dope smokers. It was the ones that HE identified with who were released. He knows what thoughts he has and attributes it to magic that he has not gone down the path to prison. So when someone says that his magic works, he is perfectly willing to believe it.

The world is almost totally irrational. I have been in a screaming tearing rage since Obama said that the US's evil in the middle east is going to continue. He is totally delusional and he is president.
12/3/09, 4:00 PM  
Blogger Melina said...
luckily, Huck was on the View today and Elizabeth Hasselbeck gave him absolution. Now that thats cleared up, we cane full steam ahead to the 2012 elections.
Huck explains it thusly; said criminal was not in jail for rape, murder, whatever when he was pardoned...he was a youngster. When he got pardoned he was serving a too long sentence for a lesser crime and no one could have known that he had murder in his heart...right??
Yhe way he explained it even had Whoopie on his side, but somehow it doesnt jibe exactly...
anyway
he claims not to allow religion to influence him (so long as he's had his flesh o' christ that week) and that being a governer is all full of these really important decisions...
meanwhile, the glaring problem with the whole thing was that this pardon is a smokescreen so that he doesnt have to go on the record with his ideas about Afghanistan, the economy and any other number of issues involving the present and future.
In his defense, Im sure one could make such a mistake when presented with hundreds of these case files over years....how can you know? But then the archaic laws allow for a young guy to be warehoused for life without any sort of real support?...it was a situation aching for a bad ending because if you commute a kid-lifer, what have you got? the possibility of the release of what has become a hardened criminal. Any alternative would involve heavy rehab and social programs, which are a no-no....
He shoulda been more like Bush and killed em all and let God sort em out...
12/3/09, 5:35 PM  
Anonymous mandt said...
"How does one reconcile someone like Mike Huckabee" how-a-bout a crucifixion? That way he can die for our sins.
12/3/09, 5:36 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Mike Huckabee's radio show is broadcast to US troops (Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force) and Department of Defense civilians throughout the world, over the Armed Forces Network's radio system, along with Limbaugh, Hannity, and the dr laura. The only non-right wingers are Ed Schultz and Colmes. Should our tax dollars go to support the Defense Department broadcasting right-wing Republican propaganda and force-feeding it into military offices, social areas, hospitals, etc., worldwide? Check out the AFN radio schedule -- (http://myafn.dodmedia.osd.mil/AFNRadio.aspx )

Jim T
12/4/09, 9:07 AM  
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