Posted on 12/05/2007 5:38:10 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Put a fork in the former fat boy - Huckabee is toast.
Byron York has the more sympathetic piece on Huckabee's role in the parole of Wayne Dumond,
the convicted rapist who was freed under Huckabee’s administration, only to rape and kill a woman in neighboring Missouri.
Even presented sympathetically the story is ghastly - Wayne Dumond raped a seventeen year old cheerleader, then was assaulted and castrated while out on bail (although there is innuendo that the castration was self-inflicted.)
Conservatives railed against an injustice (the cheerleader was a distant Clinton cousin). Huckabee promised to review the case with an eye to granting clemency upon becoming Governor. His predecessor, Jim Guy Tucker, then commuted Dumond's sentence to a level where Dumond was eligible for parole.
After being pressured by Huckabee (or not - he denies it), the parole board freed Dumond. He ended up in Missouri and raped and killed Carol Shields.
And that is the short and sympathetic version. Murray Waas has the longer and more ghastly version (As an aside, regular readers here will recall Mr. Waas from his Plame days but it turns out he wrote an award-winning piece on the Dumond case back in 2002.)
To summarize the ghastly version - Wayne Dumond died in prison in 2005 and was never charged, but he was apparently the leading suspect in the rape/murder of Sara Andrasek, which took place roughly eleven months after the Carol Shields homicide.
And the Huckabee files, as supplemented by Mr. Waas' own investigative reporting, include pleas from other victims of Wayne Dumond.
I don;t see how Huckabee survives this story, which has begun to attract some attention as he has risen in the polls. here is a month-old Arkansas editorial accusing him of running away from his own record, and here is yesterday's Kansas City Star:
Murdered women's mothers blame Huckabee for his part in killer's release By DAVE HELLING The Kansas City Star
Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said Tuesday he is “heartbroken” over the pain suffered by the families of two women murdered in the Kansas City area more than six years ago.
Authorities say the two victims, Carol Shields and Sara Andrasek, were killed by the same man: Wayne DuMond, who was released from an Arkansas prison in 1999, a year before Shields’ murder.
Their mothers say Huckabee is responsible, at least in part, for the release of DuMond, who died in a Missouri prison in 2005.
“What a fool,” Lois Davidson, Shields’ mother, said of Huckabee. “Thinking he could rule the country when he couldn’t even do a good job as governor of Arkansas.”
Eventually someone will ask Mike Dukakis for his reaction.
PILING ON: Or, if old clemency cases don't suit your fancy, how about the news that Huckabee is not up to speed on the latest National Intelligence estimate?
Somebody make him secretary of Health and Human Services so we can all lose weight.
MORE: RedState has a transcript of Huckabee's statement, which adds little.
Hot Air shows a bit of Christian compassion (a bit) and seems to be thinking that if Huckabee was filling the space meant for Thompson and now Huckabee is soon-to-be-gone, what about Fred?
And in a follow, Hot Air gets a response from the Huckabee people on the Waas letters:
Update: In response to my wondering why Huckabee would go to bat after having received these letters, Joe Carter, Huck’s director of research, e-mails:
First, the authenticity of the letters is questionable. All documents that are put into the Governor’s files are stamped with a time and date. These do not have that stamp.
Second, the idea that Dumond was railroaded was a live topic in AR for many years. The biggest paper in the state made the claim repeatedly (see attached editorial) and some key evidence was dismissed. After personally talking with the rape victim, Ashley Stevens, Governor Huckabee had not lingering doubts about Dumond’s guilt. However, Dumond had been castrated and had already served twice as long for the crime as is typical for the state. That is why the parole board did not find his release objectionable.
The letters are phony, maybe? Geez, that will squash this story. Unless every reporter in America heads to Arkansas to attempt to verify them, and provides hourly updates on their progress.
Jim Geraghty has lots at the Campaign Spot - apparently one of these letters is in fact old news, and the Lexis/Nexis sleuths from rival Republican camps are delivering faux info.
The Ace of Spades delivers a full blast against the Huckabee candidacy - I will steal only his bullets:
Let's see how Huckabee shapes up:
Soft on crime...
Tax-and-spender...
Soft on the War on Terror...
Soft on Immigration...
But Glenn airs a good point from Dave Weigel - the press loves Huck because he is funny, accessible, and a lib.
Fine, let him run as a Dem and we'll see how much they love him.
Huckabee's stand on illegal aliens alone should disqualify him from running.
If you can’t trust “The Music Man,” who can you trust?
Reverend Miguel Hucksterbee would never flim-flam us.
I’m thinking something much more sinister...DC can use him in the office as a useful idiot.
I think this is a stupid argument against Huckabee. He’s not my candidate, and I’ll let one of his supporters “defend” him, but I’m getting tired of the gotcha politics. This is democrat tactics, and we’ll have trouble objecting to their tactics in the general election because we adopted them against our own.
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