Dear Mike Hucksterbee

You're fucked, and deservedly so:

Appearing on MSNBC's Morning Joe this morning, Huckabee said of our story: "there are factual errors in what they have printed, some of it is outrageously incorrect." As an example of our factual errors, he cited... well, nothing. Not one...

But none of Huckabee's finger pointing (he mentioned Bill Clinton 12 times while discussing the Dumond case in his press conference on Tuesday) addresses the key questions raised by this tragic story: why Huckabee continued to favor the rapist's release, even after being sent police reports and wrenching letters from several of his victims detailing his horrific crimes (which included raping a woman while her 3 year old daughter lay beside her in bed); and why Huckabee, to this day, continues to insist "No one could have predicted what [Dumond] could've done when he got out" when we can read for ourselves the words of his victims predicting that the man would rape again - and perhaps murder - if released.

"Dear Wayne," Huckabee wrote in a letter to Dumond, after having read the victims' letters. "My desire is that you be released from prison." And no amount of spinning can change that, or the conclusion that Huckabee allowed his judgment to be swayed by the bleating of a collection of right-wing zealots who put their hatred of Bill Clinton over the well being of the public (Dumond's victim was a distant relative of Clinton, and the daughter of a major Clinton donor).

In interviews, Huckabee claims that his stand on Dumond was clouded by a surfeit of compassion. In reality, it was clouded by a surfeit of cynical pandering to a group whose support he felt he needed.

I watched the Huckabee interview with Scarborough yesterday, and as expected, it was horrendously executed. After a deluge of sympathetic outcries for "poor Mike Huckabee" and his being Swiftboated by terrible attack ads (true attacks on Republicans are "Swiftboat-like attacks" -- as opposed to false smears about Democrats which are reported as "rumors that won't die" on the Campaign trail).

There was absolutely NO follow-up. As if how the Bush Administration treats the press corps is the way all interviews are supposed to be conducted (as opposed to O'Reilly-like harangues).

But this situation is so easy to research and as I posted a few days ago, Huckabee is quoted at the time as making statements saying that Clinton especially had railroaded this serial rapist and murderer. And, of course, Huckabee can't walk away from those quotes nor from letters he both wrote and had written to him by simply uttering, "the Clenis".

I missed the part where Baptist ministers are exempted from the "do not bear false witness" Commandment, but I admit I'm no biblical scholar.