Mike Huckabee has been involved in his own Willie Horton controversy related to the parole of convicted rapist Wayne DuMond and the reason Huckabee pushed for the parole is a doozy!!!! Mr. DuMond was convicted of rape while Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas. After Huckabee became governor he persuaded the parole board in an illegal off the record meeting to parole Wayne DuMond. Shortly after Mr. DuMond was released he went on to murder another woman.
Why did this happen? The victim of original rape was a distant relative of Governor Bill Clinton. The conservatives in Arkansas hated Bill Clinton so much that they decided that the trial must have been fixed and Mr. DuMont because a conservative cause.
Mr. Huckabee is now claiming
Huckabee now says that he does not recall what he said to the parole board, but that he had changed his mind about DuMond and was attempting to deny clemency at the time the parole was granted. Raw story Article
Mike Huckabee has denied any role in the parole of Wayne Dumond in the past. However, the Arkansas Times had an excellant article going into great detail about the role that Mike Huckabee played in the release of Wayne Dumont and the reasons why Huckabee made such a foolish decision.
Web special: Dumond case revisited
the Times’ new reporting shows the extent to which Huckabee and a key aide were involved in the process to win Dumond’s release. It was a process marked by deviation from accepted parole practice and direct personal lobbying by the governor, in an apparently illegal and unrecorded closed-door meeting with the parole board
The hatred of anything and everything related to Bill Clinton caused the conservatives to believe that Bill must have intervened the original rape case since the victim was a distant relative. Jay Cole was a very popular conservative minister and radio host who was friends with Mike Huckabee.
On the ultra-conservative radio program he hosts, Cole has championed the cause of Wayne Dumond for more than a decade. Cole has repeatedly claimed that Dumond’s various travails are the result of Ashley Stevens’ distant relationship to Bill Clinton.
The governor was also apparently relying on information he got from Steve Dunleavy, first as a correspondent for the tabloid television show "A Current Affair" and later as a columnist for the New York Post.
"The problem with the governor is that he listens to Jay Cole and reads Steve Dunleavy and believes them ... without doing other substantative work," the state official said.
The blog "the Opinion Mill" states even more details on the background of how this became such a conservative cause.
Why were the nutcases so fixated on DuMond? Here’s where the story takes an even more grotesque Flannery O’Connor turn. While awaiting trial for the 1985 rape, DuMond was found lying in his trailer, his testicles slashed off. Though local authorities suspected the wounds were self-inflicted — something not unheard of among sexual psychopaths — DuMont claimed he’d been attacked by two men, one of whom said afterward that "Mr. C would be proud." This was catnip to the conspiracy buffs, who decided that DuMond had been castrated on Bill Clinton’s orders. The cause of truth wasn’t helped by an Arkansas lawman’s astonishingly sick decision to display the testicles in a jar, which only fueled rumors of vigilante violence. The Opinion Mill
It is troubling how their hatred of anything related to Bill Clinton dictated their views. No thought was given to the impact on the original rape victim and the events that lead Mr. Dumond to prison.
I strongly recommend reading both the OpinionMill and the Arkansas times article which are linked above. Together, they will really show the monster behind the funny, cheerful, new best republican hope to win the presidency.