I agree that it's not Huckabee's sole fault, and that people later in the chain did more to get things to this point than he did...but are we going to start calling every objection to a pol "derangment syndrome?" Not only are the people who dislike Huckabee on this board far more reasonable than many of the folks who had it in for Romney, Rudy, McCain or even Fred, they generally have their facts straight and deploy them effectively. For every post I saw last year that was truly hateful about Huck, there were 20 that were off the chain about McCain, and that was before he won the nomination.
He's a tax-raiser, soft on crime, has a loopy immigration stance and a tax plan that guarantees a Democrat win. No derangement is involved in that assessment, and that's the clear-eyed assessment I've heard again and again on FR.
That’s all true. I’m not defending Huckabee and I don’t even like him very much and never have. But what I’m saying is that blaming it all on Huckabee is ridiculous, and turning every thread on it into a hate-Huckabee thread completely destroys the usefulness of the discussion. Remember, he didn’t commute Clemmons’s sentence in a void, but in response to the demands of “community leaders” at the time and the generalized notion that a young criminal shouldn’t receive a severe sentence.
And none of the things that happened after that had anything to do with him, but they were all consistent failures to address the problem. And they were systemic failures, and that’s what we should be discussing.
Plus, I’m sure if somebody digs hard enough, at some point they’ll find that somebody from Clemmons’ apparently very active family was involved in letting him go “by accident” the first time. I think there are people within the system itself who sympathize with the criminals and will actively attempt to prevent the system, lame though it be, from working.