Mike, you look toasted

No, wait...you are toast!

It didn't take long for the news to come out that the cop shooter in Washington was pardoned from what was essentially a life sentence by the Arkansas Governor at the time, Mike Huckabee. (No disrespect towards the victims are meant in my caption. No, every bit of any disrespect is intended for Huckabee.)

I think it's safe to say that this pretty much dooms any chances he had for running for President in 2012, especially since he's faced this issue before with his pardon of a rapist who went on to rape and murder another woman. In doing some further reading, I'm disturbed by his penchant for commuting sentences.

According to an article on Politics Daily, Huckabee often let politics and connections influence his decisions. What is more disturbing to me is this:

Other prisoners, such as Clemmons, claimed to be on the straight and narrow after religious rebirths. Huckabee was "a bit of a sucker sometimes for the noble notion of personal redemption" because of his own background as a preacher, John Brummett, a columnist for the Arkansas News, wrote me in an e-mail. "He was perceived as soft or oddly sympathetic to prisoners. For a couple of years, the big political story in Arkansas was that Democrats and prosecutors professed themselves aghast at the rate at which he commuted the sentences of violent offenders."

Why did Huckabee grant the commutations? Joe Carter [former research director of his presidential campaign] says it was courage mixed with political naivete ("The governor seemed genuinely surprised that he was held responsible for the criminal acts committed by those whose sentences he had commuted as governor") and too much trust in conversion stories ("The opinion of clergy appears to have carried a great deal of weight in the decision-making process"). Carter concludes that Huckabee is an appealing candidate because of his empathy and belief in the individual, and for those same reasons he will never get to the White House.

This goes back to what I wrote the other day about keeping religion out of political decision-making. Huckabee's thinking process was obviously clouded by his own religious beliefs. As a preacher, he wants to believe that redemption can occur through Christ. But why would you take the word of clergy, let alone that of the convicted criminal himself, over that of prosecutors and professionals who maintained that some of these people were continued menaces to society? I definitely believe that people can turn their lives around. But to believe the veracity of every jailhouse conversion that comes down the pike is the height of naiveté, and there is case to be made that it is atrociously negligent.

When we saw Huckabee speak a while back, I was perplexed by his little tale of "Hucktown." I wrote this at the time:

He went into this weird shtick about a fictional place he called "Hucktown," where there was only one law: Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. Because of this law, Hucktown had no economic woes, no need for a large police force, no drug problem, no crime, blah blah blah...basically, all of our problems are due to the loss of our "sense of decency" and our lack of "ethical behavior."

WTF? I wrote down on my little pad of paper "Simplistic." To me, that is a fundamental problem with the recent Republican agenda...they want to return to a time that never existed. He painted a pretty picture, but you know what, Mike? There will always be liars, cheaters, and thieves. There will always be those who are motivated by nothing more than sheer greed. It's laudable to hope for better, and to believe the best of mankind, and you all know that for the most part, I try to be that way. I'm also a realist, and I know that there is no changing human nature, and that's why there must be regulatory agencies in place. Wow, he totally sounded like a Pollyanna on that one. "Everyone is wonderful, trust that they'll do unto you the way they would want you to do unto them!" Riiight, Mike. I bet they'd do unto me, all right.

It would seem that that is the way he lives his life, and hey, more power to you, Mike. However, this attitude, colored by your beliefs, led you to pardon some very mentally unstable and dangerous people, and now more people are dead. If you want to live your life that way, have at it; however, it is dangerous to let such a simplistic world view influence what should be a rational, logical decision based upon documented evidence from professionals. "Yeah, I killed a buncha people but I love Jeebus now" just isn't good enough.

Susan Atkins also became a born-again Christian while in prison. Remember her? She was the Manson family member who repeatedly stabbed Sharon Tate--and her eight-month old fetus-- while Tate pleaded for mercy. Henry Lee Lucas, the notorious serial killer and profligate liar, also had a jailhouse conversion. They both rightfully died in prison. There are countless others. Even that skank Paris Hilton took to reading the Bible in her cell during her incarceration and declared herself a changed person. Odd that we haven't heard more about that since she's been out.

My whole point is that it is exactly this reason that religion has no place in politics. Huckabee's own belief system, based on his religion, caused him to make horrible decisions. With a snowball's chance in hell of winning the GOP nomination in 2012, I would guess that most of his supporters will throw their support behind Sarah Palin, who quizzed Billy Graham about what the Bible had to say about Israel, Iraq, and Iran. Yeah, way to trade up there, people. Go from a guy who lets violent criminals out because they say they’ve found God to someone who apparently thinks she has a direct line to God and wants to blow the holy hell out of people based on what the Bible has to say about it.

Palin and others of her ilk are the first to squawk about how they're losing their freedom of religion. Bullshit. They're taking away our right to freedom from religion, whether personally or within our government. Such demagoguery is incredibly dangerous, and I hope there are enough of us who realize that.