Mike Huckabee is certainly learning how to parse his language so well that someone from the Bush Administration must be helping him.
The Huckster recently suggested in Newsweek that hanging a stray dog that had mange was humane. In this way, he is just like the Bush Administration: torture isn't torture if you (or your son) did it.
The jist of the accusation is that Huckabee's son, David, was fired from a summer job at a Boy Scout camp for hanging a dog. Moreover, some have alleged that Huckabee and his underlings intervened to hamper any investigation of alleged animal cruelty.
The details of the incident remain murky. The Animal Legal Defense Fund got an anonymous fax that summer alleging that David Huckabee and another youth had been involved in the hanging of a stray dog at the camp on July 11. A local animal-rights activist, Joyce Hillard, later contacted the camp director. Notes of Hillard's report to the defense fund read, "Boys confessed & were fired. Dir. is making excuses, saying dog was sic & boys were putting him out of his misery." (The director told NEWSWEEK only that a stray dog was "put down" and that the counselors were fired for violating the Scout credo to be "kind.")
Maybe it's me, but if I knew a dog was sick, I would take it to a vet and have it put down painlessly. As a pet guardian, I have had to do this and I can say that we are generally more compassionate about taking care of our sick and dying pets than we are of human beings.
My second point is that Huckabee tries to minimize the cruelty because it was only a stray that had mange. In essence, the Huckster was claiming his son was being humane.
The father of the other counselor was quoted by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette in August 1998 as saying that his son found the dog "hung over a limb and choking."
Until recently, Texas had no law against animal cruelty committed against stray animals. Apparently Huckabee thinks the same way.
FOR FULL DISCLOSURE: I have rescued two dogs, one of which was abused and whose owner was going to shoot her in the head. I have spent hundreds of hours searching the internet for the right pet for our family and the majority of abuse cases all seem to eminate from Red states.
Maybe that is a coincidence, but I'm not sure. Most of those places have huge "christian" populations and they tend to believe that animals are inferior to man because god supposedly created man last...
IMO, a person's character is revealed by how they treat animals. People who beat animals are just depraved a-holes. Studies have shown that people who graduate to torturing animals are on their way to being serial killers.
The link between animal torture and serial killing is a gateway crime. This is in fact more of a gateway than the supposed use of marijuana is a gateway to harder drug use but I digress...
Anyway, David Huckabee faced no real repercussions from his depraved indifference to life, which is ironic because these Talibangelists supposedly love life and it says so in the Ten Commandments that "thou shall not kill."
Even more sickening is the Boy Scouts didn't kick him out since he later made Eagle Scout. IMO an organization that has an irrational — perhaps latent — homophobia somehow believes that a boy that tortures and cruelly kills an animal is worthy of the designation of Eagle Scout both deserve one another!.
As usual, the cover-up is worse than a crime. In Arkansas, animal cruelty only warrants a misdemeanor.
The hanging prompted the local prosecuting attorney— bombarded with complaints generated by a national animal-rights group—to write a letter to the Arkansas state police seeking help investigating whether David and another teenager had violated state animal-cruelty laws. The state police never granted the request, and no charges were ever filed. But John Bailey, then the director of Arkansas's state police, tells NEWSWEEK that Governor Huckabee's chief of staff and personal lawyer both leaned on him to write a letter officially denying the local prosecutor's request.
Bailey, a career officer who had been appointed chief by Huckabee's Democratic predecessor, said he viewed the lawyer's intervention as improper and terminated the conversation. Seven months later, he was called into Huckabee's office and fired. "I've lost confidence in your ability to do your job," Bailey says Huckabee told him. One reason Huckabee cited was "I couldn't get you to help me with my son when I had that problem," according to Bailey. "Without question, [Huckabee] was making a conscious attempt to keep the state police from investigating his son," says I. C. Smith, the former FBI chief in Little Rock, who worked closely with Bailey and called him a "courageous" and "very solid" professional.
Naturally, the Huckster attacked the credibility of the messenger.
Huckabee called Bailey's account "totally untrue" and described him as a "bitter" exemployee. "I asked him to resign because he had so alienated the entire state police," he said. "It had nothing to do with my son." Brenda Turner, Huckabee's then chief of staff, and Kevin Crass, the Huckabee family lawyer, also disputed Bailey's account, although both acknowledged talking to him about the dog killing. "I asked him, 'Is it normal for the state police to … investigate something that happened at a Boy Scout camp?' " Turner says. "We wanted the same treatment that anybody else would get."
Contrast what Huckabee did in intervening for his son to what Bill Clinton DID NOT do for his brother who was pinched by future impeachment manager Asa Hutchinson on drug charges.
What we are seeing is that the REAL Huckster is basically a schnorrer that pocketed unreported gifts and income; used the state to provide cronies with jobs; fired political opponents; and pardoned a rapist because he only raped a Clinton relative.
Looks like Huckabee is in line for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He's doing a heck of a job so far.